IMO the MBA is intended as a facebook/internet machice, designed for web surfing, HD video watching, listening to music and general productivity like MS Office with maximum portability and battery life
For PS and illustrator, of course using an MBA works, I frequently do light photoshop design work on my 2010 Core 2 Duo MBP (far less powerful than even the entry level MBA right now) and RAW photo editing in Adobe Camera Raw, and it works fine, but I do get the occasional slowdown, delay, and beachball on more complex processes which tax the CPU. Nothing fatal, but I also know I would get a far better experience using say a current gen MBP or rMBP.
For me at least, justifying a higher end mac for photoshop/illustrator use will come down to whether I am being paid to use the software. If I am, then time is money and I should get the most productive device for that purpose. But if one messes around with this software just for fun on occasion, then an MBA would be the better device (in terms of cost and portability)
So I suppose my YR2009 MPB which is outdated must be also having intermittent performance running these software since it is roughly 40% slower than the latest MBA ?
I uses Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, running Parallels with Windows 7, Photomatix performing HDR, DxO Optics V6. So how is the latest MBA running approx 40% faster with a PCI-E SSD able to achieve 700MBps transfer speed going to fair ? I must also point out, I don't use these software for fun only, they are used in real work, for businesses, doing product design artworks. I am also a photography enthusiast, and deal with RAW NEF files of 15MB or more, when post processing them, each one can get more than 100MB each when stored and easily 500MB each when dealing with layers. I also do large number of post processing of JPEG files for events shots for freelance.
I don't get beachballs seriously.. The main keyword here is EXPECTATION. Obviously the recent MBP is going to have much better performance at a much higher price. If you want the performance and you can afford the price tag, go ahead and get the best that technology can offer. Obviously most software will run faster.
However, given that I have already mentioned my YR2009 MBP is slower than the recent MBA and yet I am doing all these intensive application, I really don't see how a faster lightweight machine of recent technology should be branded as only capable of doing less.
As such I don't agree that one should view MBA as a machine that can do less, since today I'm already doing more given a slower machine, once also the top end performer in the product line. It's just what you want to do and how you move things around.
If based on your reasoning that because MBP is more powerful than MBA and hence MBA should only do simple task, I'm afraid I have to advice others go for Mac Pro instead, since it's more powerful and definitely can do more intensive workload than MBP. Would that be a sound argument ?
It's a normally a balance between form factor and performance, but that shouldn't be a gauge of what you can do with a machine. It's all about EXPECTATION.
I suppose say too much also no point, I will let the numbers do the talking. TS you can go figure out the rest.
