Advice needed - M5 Max vs M4 Max

[MacDevil7334]

I have a couple of machines in front of my and am having a hard time deciding which to keep. Hoping to get some input. I can share the backstory if it helps. But, basically bought two machines after the price hikes were announced before prices went up everywhere.

Current machine and uses: 16” M3 Max MBP (40c/48GB/1TB). Used for astrophotography (photoshop/lightroom), mulit-GB photoshop files, some large panoramas, AI denoise, and some specialty software for image processing. Performance is fine for my needs. But, I am routinely bumping up against the 1TB internal storage these days and really wish I had bought more.

Two options in front of me (yes, I recognize the level of crazy at work here):

1. New M4 Max 40c/64GB/2TB/NT screen
2. New M5 Max 40c/48GB/2TB/glossy screen

The M4 machine is +$200 but has 23 months AC+ left on it. For that $200, I get the 16 GB more RAM and the NT screen, but lose out on the GPU AI improvements, double speed SSD, and WiFi 7/BT 6.

Where I am stuck: Normally I would just keep the M4, return the M5 to Costco, and call it a day. After all, the general rule is that more RAM is going to get you more than an extra generation processor improvement. But, there are a few things holding me back.

• I am concerned the GPU neural accelerators on the M5 Max and wireless standard updates may be more important than extra RAM on a machine that I am hoping will hold me over until some sanity returns to storage and RAM pricing in a few years. But, it’s hard to tell if this is just me having FOMO and wanting the latest chip rather than a benefit I will actually see. Either Max chip is probably overkill for my uses.
• I’m also not sure if there will be AI-related benefits from the 2x SSD speed bump in the M5 generation down the line that I’m not anticipating.
• The nanotexture was what had gotten me to buy the M4 machine in the first place. But I’m finding the nanotexture on the Mac doesn’t seem to do as good of a job eliminating glare as on my iPad after using it for a bit. It does help, but I can still see stronger light sources reflected enough that I want to reposition the screen. On my iPad, things like reflections from lamps are basically gone. I can still seem them on the Mac screen, just not as brightly as on the glossy.

So, my question is whether the M5 Max architecture is different enough to be worth keeping that one and reselling the M4 machine. To be clear, 48 GB of RAM on my current Mac has been fine. So, would I benefit more from the two-generation chip improvements of the M5 over the extra RAM of the M4? Or does the old wisdom of picking RAM over a newer processor still hold? It seems like the AI gains of the M5 are the wild card I don’t fully understand. I don’t consider the NT screen to be enough of a benefit to tip my decision either way after using it for a bit.

Would appreciate any input you have, especially related to whether the AI speed gains are likely to be noticed.

 

[benholt]

same M3 Max here (40c/48GB) with heavy Lightroom + PS work — 48GB was fine until I stacked multi-GB panoramas or ran LR AI Denoise on a queue while PS held a 5GB working file, then swap starts eating into scratch and everything gets sluggish. 64GB is the thing that ages best for your stated workflow. the M5 neural-accelerator delta on LR AI Denoise is real but modest — reviews I've read are showing ~5-6 sec/image on M4 Max down to ~3-4 sec on M5 Max, nice but not workflow-transforming for astrophoto exports. SSD 2x mostly matters when scratch is the bottleneck, but RAM covers that better by keeping the working set resident.

on the nanotexture: same experience here, the Mac coating is softer than the iPad's so bright point sources still show as a diffuse glow. if you're already underwhelmed by it, the glossy M5 isn't really a loss.

I'd keep the M4.

 

[Basic75]

Will you be using the MBP mostly with an external monitor? If not my advice is to first take another long hard look at the built-in displays. It doesn't matter that one computer might be a tad faster when you get annoyed just from looking at it because you chose the wrong nano-texture option.

 

[playtech1]

It's a tough choice as they are quite evenly matched, but I would go for the M4 Max for the extra RAM. It has the same memory bandwidth as the M5 Max, so for many AI tasks the M4 Max will be better (since bigger RAM means can run a bigger quant / have more context) or similar (as memory bandwidth is often the bottleneck). Some things will be signficiantly slower on M4 Max (prompt processing), so it's not totally clear cut, but overall more RAM = better with AI.

If local AI is only a small part of your workload then the choice is even clearer as M5 Max's improvements are more marginal in other areas and the RAM will be helpful for generally heavy applications.

I'm personally not a fan of the nano-texture screen, but that's a secondary point IMHO.

M4 Max does 6e WiFi so not really a huge difference over 7 in the real world. You won't notice the faster SSD - the one in the M4 Max is already very fast.