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fantasticman

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 11, 2015
31
21
Hi Guys

I have a 16" M1 MBP. It's become a chore to carry it around when I travel and I have been thinking of getting a 15" M3 MacBook Air instead.

With today's release of the New MBP I was wondering if it's worth it to get the base M4 MBP with 24Ram and 1TB or get the M4 pro version to kind of future proof?

I starting to edit photos and videos as a hobby but at nothing professional volume. Media consumption/ streaming . Browsing ..Lots of tabs open and all that. I want to do a bit of gaming in the future......The M1 I have with 16 RAM .. does sometimes.. struggle. only sometimes.

Would the base m4 chip be enough or or should I go for the m4 pro?
 

CalMin

Contributor
Nov 8, 2007
1,873
3,668
Interesting that your M1 Pro with 16GB struggles sometimes because I literally can't get mine to choke on anything! Even Multicam 4K editing in FCP.

It sounds like you work with lots of stuff open all the time, so I think the better investment for you is lots of RAM vs. a higher spec chip. I'd say get the M4 and load up as much RAM as your budget allows.
 

ctjack

macrumors 68000
Mar 8, 2020
1,512
1,529
Interesting that your M1 Pro with 16GB struggles sometimes because I literally can't get mine to choke on anything! Even Multicam 4K editing in FCP.

It sounds like you work with lots of stuff open all the time, so I think the better investment for you is lots of RAM vs. a higher spec chip. I'd say get the M4 and load up as much RAM as your budget allows.
with that workload it is not RAM per se.

My MBP 14 M1 Pro with 16gb of ram was lagging even in Chrome with beachballs. But the M1 Air with 8gb ram never have shown me beachballs until after MacOS update. SO i reverted M1 Air back to its' most stable MacOS and update MBP 14 all over again until settling on 12.7.6 (21H1320) which gives me finally no beachballs.
 
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russell_314

macrumors 604
Feb 10, 2019
6,630
10,208
USA
Hi Guys

I have a 16" M1 MBP. It's become a chore to carry it around when I travel and I have been thinking of getting a 15" M3 MacBook Air instead.

With today's release of the New MBP I was wondering if it's worth it to get the base M4 MBP with 24Ram and 1TB or get the M4 pro version to kind of future proof?
Nothing is future proof. In two years they could come out with AI requires 512 GB RAM so you just wasted your money. Don’t buy a computer for the future.

I starting to edit photos and videos as a hobby but at nothing professional volume. Media consumption/ streaming . Browsing ..Lots of tabs open and all that. I want to do a bit of gaming in the future......The M1 I have with 16 RAM .. does sometimes.. struggle. only sometimes.
Everything you do could be done with an M1 Air and 16 GB of RAM. When you say struggles, sure it’s going to take a few extra minutes, but I suspect you don’t have a production deadline on your hobby. I wouldn’t take it too seriously. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with buying the latest and greatest tech if you like it, but don’t think you have to spend that money.

Would the base m4 chip be enough or or should I go for the m4 pro?
The base model would be enough, but of course the pro will be faster. Two questions. Would it annoy you if it was a little bit slow or would you rather have portability? I love my M2 Air, but I don’t do anything heavy.
 
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mcdreamer

macrumors member
Sep 30, 2011
36
17
I'm wondering the same thing really about going up to the M4 Pro from my M1. The M1 has been excellent and still feels new. On the other hand, I'm doing quite a lot more intensive code compilation on this machine these days, and could benefit from the extra cores (as the M1 Ultra sitting here proves to me every day).
 

ctjack

macrumors 68000
Mar 8, 2020
1,512
1,529
The base model would be enough, but of course the pro will be faster.
Slight addition: they will be the same as far as single core speed goes and single core is 90% of what we do day to day.
One would only notice the Pro upgrade over base M4 when it comes to 8performance cores vs 4 - for example batch of 3000 wedding photos will take 25 minutes instead of 50 minutes. *numbers are made up but to show the difference in multi core.
 
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iSteveo

macrumors member
Sep 14, 2023
70
61
I bought a M2 Max with a high end configuration (at least high end to me) with the intent of using it for 10 years or so. With Apple currently on a yearly upgrade cycle, I have a feeling not upgrading for 8 more years is gonna be tough. At what point does Apple stop providing software updates for the Macbook Pro?
 

AirpodsNow

macrumors regular
Aug 15, 2017
216
141
Hi Guys

I have a 16" M1 MBP. It's become a chore to carry it around when I travel and I have been thinking of getting a 15" M3 MacBook Air instead.

With today's release of the New MBP I was wondering if it's worth it to get the base M4 MBP with 24Ram and 1TB or get the M4 pro version to kind of future proof?

I starting to edit photos and videos as a hobby but at nothing professional volume. Media consumption/ streaming . Browsing ..Lots of tabs open and all that. I want to do a bit of gaming in the future......The M1 I have with 16 RAM .. does sometimes.. struggle. only sometimes.

Would the base m4 chip be enough or or should I go for the m4 pro?
Same, went for a 14” as well since the 16 is a bit too big to lug around.

I use an app called istats from bjango, it measure over time ones cpu/gpu and memory usage. In this way I could better gauge how much I use over time of this, or even show swap files size over time of 30 days. When using it also shows which app is using the most of that resource.

I notice I max out gpu and ram when paying games. But never the cpu (like 60%). Also at normal use the 2 efficiency cores are often maxed out. In this way I know it’s helpful to have more ram and more gpu.

So I don’t think in my case I can go to a non pro chip, it’s either a pro or a max depending on how much more performance I wish to have. Having such an app it as less of a guesswork for me what to do.
 
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