Originally Posted by
ScottC
The processor doesn't really matter here. That single USB port pretty much disqualifies this from any kind of serious video production work.
I'd even question anyone using any ultrabook-class device for serious video production. Isn't that what Apple sells the Mac Pro for? I mean, you need to at least drive a couple of 2k monitors if not more not to mention the storage subsystem. I'm not personally familiar with post-processing but I do a lot of transcoding and I'd guess that you really benefit from CPU when actually manipulating the video vs just editing.
My point being that I agree that there are a number of reasons why you wouldn't use the thinnest, lightest, least powerful notebook in Apple's product line for video processing.
Originally Posted by
WIRunner
But if out of the box it has performance like a 4 year old machine, this will not bode well for the longer term viability. Regular updates to browsers, office, etc, will really start to put a drain on resources in a year. I had a netbook a few years ago, upgraded the HDD, to an SSD. It was plenty fast at first, but software upgrade after upgrade really took its toll on it. Upgrading to Windows 8 helped (seriously.) But eventually even loading Chrome took a while. I retired it in favour of a Chromebook, which too quickly became sluggish with the revisions.
My early 2008 MacBook Pro is still fine for business applications and anything in the browser. My Netbook from the same era is also totally unusable at this point even for web browsing.