When looking for a Mac laptop with the goal of video editing, there are a few items that should be looked into when trying to fit a workflow.
Let’s say you are looking for a cost effective yet small and portable laptop. Apple offers the Macbook Air. The current generation comes with a 1.6 dual-core Intel Core i5 , 8gb of ram, and discrete graphics. Although you may upgrade the internal storage, the memory is capped at the 8gb.
The Macbook Air is honestly a bit underpowered when it comes to video editing. It would run decent for photo editing but the system would be heavily taxed once entering layers upon layers. Video, you may be able to get away with proxy editing however that would require a separate system to encode the files in preparation to edit and this would be time consuming for this type of workflow and especially larger video files.
Overall, the Macbook Air is not reasonable enough to be in a functional workflow as the hardware is a bottleneck. The hardware is simply lacking the power as it feels being a dual core is a huge setback compared to the current generation i5 quadcore processors.