OT: Apple M2 vs M3

[kppolich]

MacBook Air 13"/512/16GB would be my recommendation.
Size/Weight/Power/Battery Life ratio is there and will chew through any family videos you are making unless someone has a 4k/8k camera, but it will still be fine for 99% of consumer level editing.

Chop down the RAM and go with a 15" if you want the screen real estate.

[fourflys]

Originally Posted by C40_guy

Not really...my wife plugs her M1 laptop into a hub that provides LAN connectivity, HDMI connector, multiple USB C connectors and power.

At the other end of the network is a NAS. We just use it for backup. For a while I also had an active music and video library ripped. But with almost everything available online...

One of those USB C connectors could be a large flash drive.

*If* you can afford it, a large internal SSD drive is optimal. But if you need additional storage, it's pretty straightforward.

guess I'm just thinking on how we use our laptops.. literally on our laps most of the time.. I'll admit, the NAS thing is new to me and interesting..

[Likes2ridefar]

Originally Posted by fourflys

guess I'm just thinking on how we use our laptops.. literally on our laps most of the time.. I'll admit, the NAS thing is new to me and interesting..

I have a synology 4 bay at home with 16TB storage but an external ssd is about the size of a thick credit card and shouldn’t be cumbersome at all.

[C40_guy]

Originally Posted by Likes2ridefar

I have a synology 4 bay at home with 16TB storage but an external ssd is about the size of a thick credit card and shouldn’t be cumbersome at all.

I've got a QNAP with 12T of RAID storage, and a second smaller one for backing up the first.

The second one powers on once a week, pulls a backup from its big brother, then shuts off again.

[benb]

Last week at work I was issued a 16" M3 Pro MBP at work to replace the Intel i9 one I had. (I had the last 16" MBP with an Intel chip)

I also just traded my M1 iPad Air in on a 13" iPad Air with the M2 yesterday.

And I still have a 13" M1 Macbook Pro for personal use.

Bottom line IMO is anything after the M1 doesn't even matter unless you really know you have a specific high performance use case.

Some of my work tasks take about 1/3 the time on the M3 Pro vs the 2021 Intel i9 MBP it replaced. That saves me close to an hour of compute time in a workday. That is worth it and probably means the company recoups the cost of the new computer very quickly. But what I do for work is extremely far away from anything to do with consumer use. I run a linux VM and we fire up about 10 containers in it to run the product I work on. The product I work on is not supported on any laptop or desktop machine period and normally gets run on 5-10 different machines in the cloud. We run them in development in a VM just cause if the laptop is fast enough it saves time. And then simultaneously I'm running an IDE with hundreds of thousands of source files in it and compiling and running tests.

Outside of that there is nothing I do at all for personal stuff where anything beyond the M1 matters. Work on photos from my Canon 5D? Basically instant on any of the machines. Edit 4K video? For the amount I do it's all very fast on any of them. Want to write an iPhone app? No way I would need the M3 that I have at work for anything I could personally write at home unless I retire and start my own company and build a very large application that would probably also have to have a cloud backend before I'd start to need a bigger machine to code on.

[Likes2ridefar]

It may not matter now but what about five years from now? Maybe the gains are so small it doesn’t matter even then between m1 m2 m3. Are they all silent? I really like how the m3 is fanless, never seems to get warm, and has An incredible battery life.

[tylercheung]

The M4 is just coming out which looks like a bigger jump than M3. BUT I still am using the M1 I bought in 2021 and it still laughs at anything I throw at it.

also have an AMD desktop and that thing is just a giant powerhungry jet engine compare with the M1 where the fans barely turn on

[benb]

Originally Posted by Likes2ridefar

It may not matter now but what about five years from now? Maybe the gains are so small it doesn’t matter even then between m1 m2 m3. Are they all silent? I really like how the m3 is fanless, never seems to get warm, and has An incredible battery life.

They are all basically effectively silent. I have never heard the fan come on in my MBP M1 after 4 years of use.

My Intel i9 MBP at work ran the fan about 75% of my workday. It hasn't been long but doing the same thing on the M3 it has never come on yet. It's a dramatic enough thing it reduces the amount of time I wear noise cancelling headphones.

The thing is are you doing something where the computer chugs for *minutes* and you do it all day long? If you are then you think about spending thousands on a new computer. If not don't worry about it.

It would take me 5-15 minutes to compile the product I work on using the i9, and 10 minutes to start the product.

I just compiled it in 2:36 on the M3 Pro and it takes 3-4 minutes to start.

I do that very very frequently. If it was my computer and my time and that time was money that would immediately justify the $3099 for the new computer. If I save one hour of waiting for the computer every day that pays for the computer extremely quickly.

But at home after 4 years the only thing that is not instantaneous on my M1 machine is pretty much exporting a substantial edited 4K video. I don't even do that once a month, so it's hardly worth spending money to make that faster. And it's pretty darn fast anyway.

[.RJ]

Originally Posted by tylercheung

The M4 is just coming out which looks like a bigger jump than M3. BUT I still am using the M1 I bought in 2021 and it still laughs at anything I throw at it.

Same, it just blows through photo editing tasks.

[C40_guy]

Originally Posted by fourflys

guess I'm just thinking on how we use our laptops.. literally on our laps most of the time.. I'll admit, the NAS thing is new to me and interesting..

One nice thing about having a NAS is that you can set automatic backups, either file based, or using TimeMachine for Macs. Works via WiFi so you'll never know...until you need it.