Sell 14" M4 Max and pick up 16" M1 Max?

[M3Stang]

Wondering if anyone else has done this.

Since buying my M4 Max last year, I have gotten heavy into local LLMs. 36GB ram has been awful to deal with. I also miss my 16" M3 Pro screen size and the speakers.

Looking on eBay and locally, I can sell my M4 Max for more than I paid for it.Thinking I sell it and pick up an M1 Max 64Gb for around $1200. I could have my big screen again and have my LLMs have more headroom, and best of all, pocket over $1500. I do play games often on my Mac, I do know the M1 Max is no where near as good in graphics, but I also have a gaming PC so I don't care too much. The binned M4 Max is like a double edged sword. Most of time, I use it like a MacBook Air. When I push it hard, it's a jet engine, and loads LLMs onto Swap and throttles. I feel like for my use case, it's just not right anymore. Wondering if besides losing ray tracing and mesh shaders, if there is anything else major I might lose?

I have been trying to figure out who the binned one is for lately, since the 33% drop in men band width just really hurts LLM throughput apparently. I do use the 3 screens external all the time. Maybe more for video editors? (which I never do).

 

[anakinfan8]

I can't say for sure what it will entail specifically, but with the "experience" announcement today it may be worth holding off on any Mac-related purchases until afterwards. Perhaps once the M5s release (if they do indeed get announced in March), I'd imagine an M4 Max with more RAM would go down in price; if not, the M5s may be more AI-oriented (based on how they marketed the base-model Pro/M5 iPad Pro). I hope you work something out!

 

[macaddiict]

I don't think you'll find a 16" M1 Max similar to a 16" M3 Pro. LLM support on Apple Silicon was very much oriented toward granular ML tasks until M2, but way more meaningfully improved for your use cases with M3. Go for a Max or Ultra (remote) rather than stepping way down, even if you need to wait a few months.

 

[BeatCrazy]

M1 Max might be starting to have its battery weaken, so account for that.

Personally, I'd keep the M4 and look for a cheap Mac Studio with 64GB to run the LLMs. Assuming you can afford both.

 

[M3Stang]

With the launch of the M5 Max today I might just sell my M4 Max and upgrade. Will wait and see next week when LLM benchmarks come out if it’s worth it. I’d be eyeing a 16” unbinned Max with 64GB. I saw the pro supports 64GB now which is nice but that would probably be a major downgrade for me other than the faster prompt processing.

 

[M3Stang]

Figured I’d come back to this. Bought a MacBook Neo for fun like a lot of others probably did. Ended up finding myself only using it. Set up my Mac mini for desk use and put the M4 Max away to pretend I didn’t have it. I didn’t miss it. I sold the M4 Max. Now I have my base M4 Mini and Neo 256. I still have my AI inference server and my gaming pc.

M1 Max 16 64GB are starting to however around $1200 for 64GB. I might return the Neo since I am Best Buy total I get like 2 months or something to decide and get one just because I miss my old M3 Pro 16”. Is the neos screen not that great at night? Yeah but I got a couple thousand in my pocket now and I might just keep that there lol. Idk. I don’t think I’m as much of a power user as I thought. My work provides me with a laptop to get work done. My personal ones are just toys really.