I would add one important point that wasn't mentioned so far Even though the Air will run the actual application pretty fast (in fact both Photoshop and Illustrator start up faster on Air because of the SSD drive) there is a significant problem with storage space. Both PSDs and AI files can get fairly large and especially if you have the 128 GB version you are going to run out of space fast. italic I would look at it this way - if you are expecting to use Photoshop & Illustrator only occasionally maybe once a week and you have an external drive etc - you are good with the Air. If you are doing daily design work and especially if you are working with RAW files prior to Photoshop editing you might want to consider the Pro both from performance and storage perspective. My DSLR spews out shots 25MB a pop for the .CR2 files and then there is the exported JPG or PSD on top of that. It adds up! I personally have worked across all of the Apple Mac linup (Mac Pro iMac Pro Air) and I find that a fully upgraded Macbook Pro is the best choice (for me!) as I can get some pretty decent performance on the go. I use it for both graphic design and 3D modelling & rendering and it holds up fine even for fairly heavy tasks.