MacBook Air M4 for DaVinci Resolve

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Level 1

4 points

MacBook Air M4 for DaVinci Resolve

Hi All 👋

I am planning to buy a MacBook Air M4 chip with 10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine 32GB unified memory And 512GB SSD storage as I am on a budget and cannot afford MacBook Pro higher versions

I am planning to buy this mostly to edit Videos on DaVinci resolve. Anyone who used DaVinci on MacBook air with multiple layers faced any issue while editing? Like freezing frame while scrubbing the timeline?

iPhone 16e, iOS 26

Posted on Aug 14, 2025 08:41 AM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

157,302 points

Aug 14, 2025 12:56 PM in response to Vrooon31

Those Mac specs should work fine for using DaVinci Resolve for editing videos.

However, there are some practical caveats. The MacBook Air has no active cooling, so during long export sessions or heavy grading with noise reduction, it can throttle down to keep temps in check. You might notice slower render speeds compared to a MacBook Pro, but the day-to-day editing experience should still be smooth unless you’re pushing 6K+ RAW footage or doing complex Fusion compositions.

One option is to use laptop cooling pad to help dissipate any heat, something like the following should be considered:

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