Intel Lunar Lake for photo and video editing (vs Apple MacBook Air M3)
Introduction
If you are looking just for comparison, jump to the “real life performance” section. Or keep reading for more context.
I’m no Apple fan. Actually, I prefer to work with Windows. Yet, my journey to find a photo-editing laptop ended with the MacBook Air M3. Silent laptop with very good Lightroom Classic performance.
And because I still prefer Windows, and I miss some Windows-only applications, I got caught by the Lunar Lake hype train and ended up buying Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Aura Edition with Intel Core Ultra 7 258V.
In this post I share my impressions with photo and video editing on Lunar Lake and compare it to MacBook Air M3.
A bit of recent history – Intel vs Apple
Apple M chips are a de-facto benchmark for creative tools like Lightroom and DaVinci Resolve. Especially in the mobile segment, for a long time PCs could not catch up.
If you ever had a chance to work with Lightroom or DaVinci Resolve on both PC and Mac, you surely noticed that Apple laptops are snappier and quieter, with better battery life and portability. The pinnacle being MacBook Air: fanless laptop offering photo and video editing experience equal to, or exceeding, that of PC laptops with discrete graphics cards. Yes, however strange it seems, Lightroom Classic and DaVinci resolve are smoother on fanless Apple laptop than on PC laptop with discrete GPU. PCs with discrete GPUs are quicker with imports and exports, though.
Also, the fast PC laptops are usually heavy, loud, run hot and have short battery life.
Enter Lunar Lake – Intel promises a lot
With Lunar Lake Intel made a lot of promises: from “breakthrough power efficiency” to new heights of media engine performance.
Just look at these images from Intel:
Real life performance for photo and video editing
What defines performance in my work with Lightroom Classic and DaVinci Resolve is responsiveness during editing. I want to see changes I make immediately, I want to scrub video quickly and be able to play it without stuttering.
I don’t mind imports or exports that much.
So, do we finally have a PC version of MacBook Air for photo and video editing?
There is no doubt Intel is getting closer: Lunar Lake laptops have longer battery life, less fan noise and less heat. But the performance gap remains. While my Yoga with Lunar Lake was absolutely usable as a photo and (basic) video editing tool, having it next to MacBook Air made differences clear.
What stands out to me, is the stuttering response to sliders in Lightroom Classic on a PC laptop with Lunar Lake chip. Just have a look at this:
Experience with DaVinci Resolve is similar. Neither Air nor Yoga can play transitions fluently in my projects. Still, Air is more fluent and, outside of transitions, stuttering is practically non-existing.
Using timeline proxy mode on Yoga improves the playback a lot, but this lowers the quality of preview. Not a big deal on a laptop screen, but when working on a 4K monitor this becomes visible.
One more thing is that two fans in Yoga are working most of the time (on “balanced” profile), while Air remains silent, obviously.
As I mentioned before, imports and exports are not that important to me, but they are easy to compare, so here are some numbers:
First, Lightroom Classic, importing 531 files (24 MPix): Yoga: 11:33, Air: 11:27. Good!
Next, DaVinci Resolve, export of 4K video, about nine and half minutes long, basic grading + stabilization. Yoga: 10:59, Air: 06:55, That’s a significant difference.
During imports and exports both Yoga with Lunar Lake and MacBook Air with M3 are getting hot. But Air remains silent and Yoga gets quite loud.
Conclusion
What can I say? While I liked working with Yoga, I couldn’t get over stuttering in Lightroom. It simply made my work harder, and I decided to return Yoga. I still have hope that next Intel, AMD or Qualcomm chips will catch up with Apple and I will not have to choose between Windows and Lightroom performance.