It’s not confusing. If Apple Silicon is advancing quickly, then the best strategy is to upgrade each year or two, rather than buy a fully maxxed out model that you plan to keep for 5 years.
I’ve never followed the fully maxed out, long term purchase strategy. I’ve always gone with the best CPU I could afford, and enough ram and SSD to last me a year or two.
“Unfortunately” I got stuck at the 10 core 14” M1Pro MacBook Pro with 8P cores and 2E cores. My DAW only uses P cores, so the equivalent M2Pro and M3Pro really weren’t much of an upgrade…especially the 12 core M3Pro being 6p6e.
Now that there is an M4Pro chip with 10P cores I’m interested in upgrading! If I do, it would be the 14core M4Pro Mac Mini with base ram and SSD. That will be a kick ass machine for a couple of years until we get an M series pro chip with 12P cores.
Since with rare exceptions like Intel's periods of stagnation this is the same situation
everyone has been in for the
entire 40+ year history of home computing, the best strategy is actually exactly the same as it's always been:
When your current computer isn't doing what you need of it, then buy the best balance of what you can afford and need/want from a computer. Then don't think about the fact that whatever you just bought will be outdated in six months.
If whatever you buy today is doing what you need it to today, then it's very likely
still doing what you need it to a year from now, in which case it doesn't matter if you can now buy something
ten times as fast for the same price then.
We're still using plenty of computers at work that are 4-6 years old. They are all from just before Intel started improving things, so they're all drastically slower than something new. And it's fine! They're slower than my current phone, sure, but they're also perfectly sufficient for people to get their work done without suffering or wasting time, so literally
nobody is complaining, because they're not spec-hounds who care what Geekbench says or whether their computer is faster or slower than what's on the desk next to theirs, they're people who need a tool to do a job.
I will say, though, that here's my personal argument for buying high end and keeping it longer: Assuming that you do, indeed, get an extra 2-3 years out of a high-end computer, you don't need to go through the hassle of changing as often. That's one of my main reasons to go high-end at home; I get to have fun with the latest-and-greatest for a little while, then have something that's still quite decent for another few years without having to shop for or migrate to something new, even if it's better.
