# Macbooks. Underpowered?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/macbooks-underpowered/773647>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [December 2, 2016, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/macbooks-underpowered/773647 "2016-12-02T16:53:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![somepumpkin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/7feea3/32.png) [@somepumpkin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/somepumpkin)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 4:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/macbooks-underpowered/773647/1 "2016-12-02T16:53:36Z")

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I’m considering buying a new or refurb MacBook and I’m wondering if I’ll notice how \*unpowerful \*it is. I’ve read that it’s not as slow as “expected” but I don’t know what to expect, ha!

The most I’d really ask of it is to play my iTunes while I do some hobby-level Photoshoppin’. Should I expect to be disappointed? Merely noticing a bit slower performance is ok, but I don’t want to watch the spinning beach ball with every click.

Also of note, I currently have a ~2014 McBookPro (2.6 GHz, i5 w/ 8GB ram) that’s my daily driver.

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**Author:** ![beowulff](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/beowulff/32/542_2.png) [@beowulff](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beowulff)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/macbooks-underpowered/773647/2 "2016-12-02T17:48:02Z")

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Nope.  
Just don’t expect awesome performance from a MacBook Air (although they are plenty fast).  
A core i7 is about as fast as you can get in a laptop. If you opt for a lower-performance chip (an i3 or i5) you get better battery life at the cost of reduced speed.

But, any modern machine can easily do what you want.

FWIW, my brand-new 2016 Core i7 2.9GHz MacBook Pro benchmarks at about 30% faster than my huge desktop machine, a 3.4GHz Core i7 2600K Hackintosh.