Pro or Max? Is Max worth it?

[SHNXX]

I currently have the 13" MacBook Pro intel heatpad, 1.4 GHz quad core i5 with 16 gb ram.

It's a laggy piece of **** tbh for work because at any given moment I usually have 50 tabs on safari/chrome, 10-30 PDFs, and office suites open.
On the other hand, I don't multitask on my iPad Pro that much but it doesn't heat very much and it's very fast and pleasant to use.


What should I get - pro or max?
What are you getting - pro or max and why?

 

[TylerL]

Sounds like your workload is RAM-limited (albeit overkill in a self-inflicted way).
It could benefit from the extra RAM capacities (64GB) available to the M1 Max, but would not take advantage of the additional graphics performance in the slightest.

 

[ewu]

if you have enough Money, max all specs and then you won't have any problem in ram limit.

 

[SHNXX]

Sounds like your workload is RAM-limited (albeit overkill in a self-inflicted way).
It could benefit from the extra RAM capacities (64GB) available to the M1 Max, but would not take advantage of the additional graphics performance in the slightest.

Yes, it is self inflicted and I wouldn't use any graphics whatsoever (would YouTube use it?).
Maybe 64 is worth it then...

 

[SHNXX]

if you have enough Money, max all specs and then you won't have any problem in ram limit.

yes, if I had infinite amount of money, I'd own apple and wouldn't need to pay for the laptop.

 

[OriginalBaki]

I currently have the 13" MacBook Pro intel heatpad, 1.4 GHz quad core i5 with 16 gb ram.

It's a laggy piece of **** tbh for work because at any given moment I usually have 50 tabs on safari/chrome, 10-30 PDFs, and office suites open.
On the other hand, I don't multitask on my iPad Pro that much but it doesn't heat very much and it's very fast and pleasant to use.


What should I get - pro or max?
What are you getting - pro or max and why?

You just need a lot of RAM and decent CPU overhead. M1 Pro should be enough. Get 32GB ram.

 

[smirking]

Sounds like your workload is RAM-limited (albeit overkill in a self-inflicted way).
It could benefit from the extra RAM capacities (64GB) available to the M1 Max, but would not take advantage of the additional graphics performance in the slightest.

The OP is probably not RAM limited. An 8Gb 13" M1 of any stripe would make short work of 50 tabs. I test abused one and I threw a lot lot more than tabs at it. I'm a back end developer working on memory munching Web applications and the 16GB M1 Pro is likely enough for me, but the cost to bump up to 32GB isn't prohibitive so I'll probably end up with 32GB. I had been planning on a 16GB all along before the pricing was unveiled.

 

[smirking]

BTW @SHNXX, your problem is probably the Office Suites. I take that to mean MS Office. That'll bring anything to its knees. One of the only things that didn't perform well on the 8GB 13" M1 that I tested out was MS Office. No surprise as that also performs like crap on my 2018 32GB MBP even with nothing else running.

From what you're describing, you're probably fine with a base M1 Pro. I'm trying to figure out how many GPU cores I need. I have no idea what a GPU core even signifies in terms of performance so I guess I'll have to either make a leap of faith or wait for benchmarks.

 

[dmb8021]

Going to piggyback on this thread, but for someone who uses Lightroom and Photoshop for photo editing (no video, but the occasional timelapse), would the Max be overkill (not sure if either program would take advantage of the additional GPU)?

 

[smirking]

Going to piggyback on this thread, but for someone who uses Lightroom and Photoshop for photo editing (no video, but the occasional timelapse), would the Max be overkill (not sure if either program would take advantage of the additional GPU)?

I think we're going to just have to wait for benchmarks. I'm currently on a 32GB 2018 with a Vega20. I also had an 8GB 13" M1 MBP (with 8 GPU cores) for a short period of time. I use Capture One Pro and the 13" M1 performed at least on par if not better for processing edits than my current machine with a Vega20. It did well enough that I wouldn't find much difference between a 2x improvement and an 8x one. I'd be the limiting factor.