Macbook Pro: cost-effective specs for music production?

[Cardbored]

Hello all, I'm a semi-pro music recording engineer/producer and am looking at getting a new MacBook 16" as my old computer is on its last legs. I will be using this computer almost exclusively for music recording & production, and being able to run a whole bunch of CPU hungry audio plugins at once is definitely my biggest requirement.

I'm hoping to understand a bit better the options that are available so that I don't spend more money than is sensible. Initially I just wanted to max out everything and pay top-dollar, but with the drop in income at the moment I'm hoping to see if I can still get the top notch performance I'm looking for, whist perhaps saving a significant amount on the cost.

Below are the options I can choose from for processor, memory & graphics. I should be okay to work out how much storage I will require.

----

Processor:
2.6GHz 6-core ninth‑generation Intel Core i7 processor with Turbo Boost up to 4.5GHz

2.3GHz 8‑core ninth‑generation Intel Core i9 processor with Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz

2.4GHz 8-core ninth‑generation Intel Core i9 processor with Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz

Memory:
16GB of 2666MHz DDR4 memory

32GB of 2666MHz DDR4 memory

64GB of 2666MHz DDR4 memory

Graphics:
AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory

AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 8GB of GDDR6 memory

----

Any help would be very much appreciated!

Thanks!

 

[thekev]

You didn't provide the important information. I'm probably not the one to give you an exact answer, but I can narrow it down.

What do your peers with similar requirements run?
What are you using currently? If it's many years old and functions at all, your requirements are most likely trivially satisfied by any of these.
What demanding software do you expect to run?

You can pretty much axe the top choices. The difference between the 2.3 and 2.4 is trivial. If you needed or would significantly benefit 64 GB of ram, you wouldn't be posting here. You would have replaced the thing > 2 years ago, because it would have been unbearable.

If you can't demonstrate that the software you run is both accelerated by metal and it's meaningfully faster for tasks that make up part of your usual workflow, then buy the cheapest gpu. Otherwise consult peers prior to purchase, regardless of advice on here.

For the remaining points, I would make sure you at least consult some of your peers prior to purchasing anything, if it's a meaningful financial decision rather than a toy. Your software may not benefit significantly or at all based on your choice of gpu. Not everything uses metal (a lot of things don't). Even if they use it, it does not guarantee that you will see a difference between the base and top options. CPU comes down to how well it scales with additional cores and the way you use it. Ram is the same.

If you really don't know and can't consult with peers who do similar work and plan on ordering directly from Apple, they have a generous return policy. I would personally go with the cheapest in that case and make sure you have meaningful tests set up to validate the purchase. Exchange if you find it's not enough. I personally budget these things based around what I'll need within the next 2 years, because beyond that, you don't really know.

 

[Cardbored]

You didn't provide the important information. I'm probably not the one to give you an exact answer, but I can narrow it down.

What do your peers with similar requirements run?
What are you using currently? If it's many years old and functions at all, your requirements are most likely trivially satisfied by any of these.
What demanding software do you expect to run?

You can pretty much axe the top choices. The difference between the 2.3 and 2.4 is trivial. If you needed or would significantly benefit 64 GB of ram, you wouldn't be posting here. You would have replaced the thing > 2 years ago, because it would have been unbearable.

If you can't demonstrate that the software you run is both accelerated by metal and it's meaningfully faster for tasks that make up part of your usual workflow, then buy the cheapest gpu. Otherwise consult peers prior to purchase, regardless of advice on here.

For the remaining points, I would make sure you at least consult some of your peers prior to purchasing anything, if it's a meaningful financial decision rather than a toy. Your software may not benefit significantly or at all based on your choice of gpu. Not everything uses metal (a lot of things don't). Even if they use it, it does not guarantee that you will see a difference between the base and top options. CPU comes down to how well it scales with additional cores and the way you use it. Ram is the same.

If you really don't know and can't consult with peers who do similar work and plan on ordering directly from Apple, they have a generous return policy. I would personally go with the cheapest in that case and make sure you have meaningful tests set up to validate the purchase. Exchange if you find it's not enough. I personally budget these things based around what I'll need within the next 2 years, because beyond that, you don't really know.

Thanks thekev!

My current setup is:

MacBook Pro 2013
3 GHz Intel Core i7 (dual-core I'm pretty sure)
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

This computer is seriously slow and glitchy when working with medium to larger projects. Large projects are basically impossible unless you do major workarounds (which I am almost always forced to do). So I wanna get the best upgrade I can which will (hopefully) alleviate most of my issues, I just don't want to be spending on upgrades if there is no practical reason to do so.

 

[Fishrrman]

One other thing to consider before you buy the 16" (which requires Catalina):
Does ALL the software you intend to use come in "64-bit" versions?

Catalina WILL NOT RUN older 32-bit apps/plugins/etc.

 

[Cardbored]

One other thing to consider before you buy the 16" (which requires Catalina):
Does ALL the software you intend to use come in "64-bit" versions?

Catalina WILL NOT RUN older 32-bit apps/plugins/etc.

Thanks Fishrrman! Yes I'm all sorted with Catalina!

 

[thekev]

Thanks thekev!

My current setup is:

MacBook Pro 2013
3 GHz Intel Core i7 (dual-core I'm pretty sure)
8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB

This computer is seriously slow and glitchy when working with medium to larger projects. Large projects are basically impossible unless you do major workarounds (which I am almost always forced to do). So I wanna get the best upgrade I can which will (hopefully) alleviate most of my issues, I just don't want to be spending on upgrades if there is no practical reason to do so.

Sure. That computer is quite old, but best is really subjective here. You didn't mention what software or what the scope of projects is like. The software largely determines what you can leverage and what scales well with what configure to order upgrades if any.

MacBook Pro "Core i7" 3.0 13" Early 2013 Specs (Retina Early 2013, BTO/CTO, MacBookPro10,2, A1425, 2672): EveryMac.com

Technical specifications for the MacBook Pro "Core i7" 3.0 13" Early 2013. Dates sold, processor type, memory info, hard drive details, price and more.

everymac.com

Here's a link to the machine I think you're describing. One thing I want to mention as a general guideline, which you didn't include in your specs is, make sure you have a comfortable amount of hard drive space. Even with ssds, you don't want to be nearly full.

For lack of better benchmarks that would be more relevant to your workloads, here's geekbench. From what I can tell, they do a combination of memory bound and compute bound ops. Their benchmarks seem to include ffts and gemm, variants of which are used likely used quite a lot internally in any kind of audio processing. Geekbench 4 also supports SSE, AVX512, etc, although I don't expect AVX512 has shown up in notebook chips. Even if it did, it might not be useful there.

For reference, the 6 core is showing a multithreaded score of 5298. The model I think you're running shows 1436.

GPU based compute via metal is not really tested here, but it can be completely irrelevant. I wouldn't allocate money to that unless one of your direct peers can advocate for it, because it's a big unknown and requires highly specialized code to be be written and tested for OSX only.

If one of your major pain points is memory, it might be worth going to 32GB, but again it's hard to say anything concrete. I tend to think your own peer group is a much better source of information, but you need to provide them information about what software you're using and the scope of your overall projects. Otherwise they too may be back to speculation, albeit with more domain specific knowledge than I have here.

 

[Cardbored]

Sure. That computer is quite old, but best is really subjective here. You didn't mention what software or what the scope of projects is like. The software largely determines what you can leverage and what scales well with what configure to order upgrades if any.

MacBook Pro "Core i7" 3.0 13" Early 2013 Specs (Retina Early 2013, BTO/CTO, MacBookPro10,2, A1425, 2672): EveryMac.com

Technical specifications for the MacBook Pro "Core i7" 3.0 13" Early 2013. Dates sold, processor type, memory info, hard drive details, price and more.

everymac.com

Here's a link to the machine I think you're describing. One thing I want to mention as a general guideline, which you didn't include in your specs is, make sure you have a comfortable amount of hard drive space. Even with ssds, you don't want to be nearly full.

For lack of better benchmarks that would be more relevant to your workloads, here's geekbench. From what I can tell, they do a combination of memory bound and compute bound ops. Their benchmarks seem to include ffts and gemm, variants of which are used likely used quite a lot internally in any kind of audio processing. Geekbench 4 also supports SSE, AVX512, etc, although I don't expect AVX512 has shown up in notebook chips. Even if it did, it might not be useful there.

For reference, the 6 core is showing a multithreaded score of 5298. The model I think you're running shows 1436.

GPU based compute via metal is not really tested here, but it can be completely irrelevant. I wouldn't allocate money to that unless one of your direct peers can advocate for it, because it's a big unknown and requires highly specialized code to be be written and tested for OSX only.

If one of your major pain points is memory, it might be worth going to 32GB, but again it's hard to say anything concrete. I tend to think your own peer group is a much better source of information, but you need to provide them information about what software you're using and the scope of your overall projects. Otherwise they too may be back to speculation, albeit with more domain specific knowledge than I have here.

Thanks for the help thekev!