mac

I chose the MacBook Air M5 for my work
My new Apple MacBook Air M5 arrives on launch day. 11 March 2026. © Neil Turner

A few months ago I wrote a blog post about the replacement cycle that I have been through since my very first laptop arrived in 1994. It’s complicated because for the last fifteen or so years I have always had at least two laptops on the go at any given time. That has tended to mean a “full-sized” MacBook Pro for the serious editing sessions and a MacBook Air for lugging around with me on jobs. Supplement that with a desk based computer and I’ve always been pretty well equipped.

About six hours after I posted which M4 chipped MacBook I was going to get Apple announced the M5 series of processors and I decided to wait a little while before committing my hard earned cash. I’ve watched the reports about the various configurations of M5 MacBook Pro models but in the end I decided that my need for a lightweight Mac was greater and ordered an M5 powered MacBook Air for delivery on the first day they became available. That was a couple of days ago and so far (and it really is early days) I am delighted with it. I opted for a 13″ M5 10‑core CPU, 10‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine model with 24Gb of RAM and a 1TB hard drive and, as you can see from the photograph above, I opted for the silver finish over the other options as it looks less conspicuous.

After setting it up from a Time Machine backup on a fast SSD external drive and going through and swapping licenses around to enable everything to work my new Mac was ready to roll. “So how is it going?” I hear at least one of you asking…

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The laptop cycle

I’ve had laptops since the mid 1990s and I have used each of them until they were no longer capable of doing their job quickly and efficiently. Most of that work has involved editing photographs and the vast majority of the time those edits have been completed away from the office. The title of this post is “The laptop cycle” and I called it that because my needs from a laptop vary over time. Things are changing again and it appears that I am just rotating into a period where I am doing a lot of editing on the road.

For the last couple of years I have either been uploading direct from my cameras and then doing a considered edit when I am back at my desk or doing some very simple and quick edits on my 2021 M1 MacBook Air. I bought it as a back up for a fully loaded 2017 MacBook Pro and to have as a lightweight travel companion. In 2022 I invested in an M1 Mac Studio for the office and the older MacBook Pro (which still works fine) was relegated to being a back up itself. The 2017 machine which felt relatively lightweight when I bought it now feels pretty cumbersome and so I haven’t carried it on a job since early in 2021.

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Computer speed and power in my real world

When Apple announced their new desktop Mac – the Mac Studio – I watched the keynote address and was very interested in what this new bit of kit had to offer. Starting at £2000.00 including VAT it looks like a veritable speed machine. I have read some reviews and looked at test bench scores which are supposed to give us real world performance data so that we can compare one machine against another. With all of that in mind, it looks really good. But… what do those score mean for me?

In the editor part of my working life I often end up editing 200, 300, 400 or more RAW files from different cameras a day. When I am shooting my own pictures it is rarely that many and, of course, the files will all be from my own cameras and therefore not varied set of RAW formats. The most power hungry work will all be inside Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) and I want to know what time savings this new Mac will actually give me. Having watched several reviewers (mostly high-end video editors) talk about what has frustrated them in their workflow I started thinking about the relatively few times I find myself waiting for things to happen in ACR.

The truth is that there aren’t many things that take time and frustrate me with my ageing 15″ MacBook Pro but here are a few:

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The copyright symbol and Windows

I’m a Mac user and I have been for the last sixteen years. They make some great tools and some amazing gadgets but the best thing about Macs is that they seem to be made for people like me. I was having this conversation with a student on one of the excellent photographic courses at the Arts University College at Bournemouth and I realised that my preference for Apple computers can be summed up by the fact that the copyright symbol is just there – alt+g – whereas on a Windows machine you have to hunt for it. I have just Googled “how to find the copyright symbol on a Windows computer” and had to laugh out loud at the first website that came up:

“Hold down the Alt key and type 0169 if you have separate numeric keys on your keyboard. Alternatively you can go to programmes, accessories and select “character map” which allows you to assign a short cut to any symbol that you choose. Unfortunately not every copy of Windows has this loaded and you may need to reload it from your system discs”.

Does this seem long-winded to you? Shouldn’t a symbol as important as the copyright one just be there? I know that the option of using (c) is there and almost everyone recognises it but the correct symbol should be much easier to find than it is on most Windows machines.

The serious point here is that copyright is important. Actually, copyright is vital and we all need to mark our work at every opportunity to make sure that everyone knows that all intellectual property has an owner and stop copyright abuse.