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by Rocky Sharwell on Tue Mar 08, 2022 5:19 pm
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Apple announced the Mac Studio today( https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/) I am considering one with an M1 Max as a replacement for my 2017 iMac. I have no interest in video. I have no idea about how much of  a difference CPU and GPU cores make. What would be a optimal configuration?
Thanks 
Rocky Sharwell
 

by E.J. Peiker on Wed Mar 09, 2022 6:40 am
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We will have to wait for benchmarks to really answer this definitively.  This is a good youtube stream that dives into these things - it has a very Apple fanboy vibe but they do run a lot of benchmarks.  I'm sure there will be plenty of other sites that have benchmarks available although it might be a few weeks since these won't ship for a while yet...
https://www.youtube.com/c/MaxTechOfficial/videos
 

by Mark L on Wed Mar 09, 2022 10:25 am
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E.J. is absolutely correct; real world benchmarks are necessary to really know how fast the configurations are and how they work for your use case.  However, I can tell you that I moved from a 6 year old desktop Windows PC to the new 14" MacBook Pro with the M1 max, full graphics and 64 GB memory in January.  I now use the laptop as my only computer (dock connecting to external drives, a large monitor, etc.) and love it.  The graphics performance with Photoshop, Lightroom Classic and the Topaz AI routines is really good and I have never run into a memory issue.

Clearly it will be possible to have more processing and graphics power if one chooses the M1 Ultra and more memory will be available.  How much either of these contributes to better performance needs to be demonstrated/tested. 
 

by Rocky Sharwell on Wed Mar 09, 2022 9:35 pm
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Thanks---I am in no rush but will confess that I was hyped up after the announcement. It has also crossed my mind that a new MacBook Pro might be an option as my old one is starting to decline battery wise
Rocky Sharwell
 

by Mark L on Wed Mar 09, 2022 9:55 pm
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As you have certainly heard, one of the really outstanding attributes of the M1 chips is power efficiency.  The battery life on the new 14" and 16" MacBook Pro models is great. 
 

by Axel Hildebrandt on Thu Mar 10, 2022 10:11 am
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I bought the 16'' MBP M1 Max model with 32 GB RAM, 10 CPU and 32 GPU cores, which is plenty fast for all photography-related things. For example, with my old 2017 MBP processing one image in DxO PureRAW took about 5 minutes, with the new one 15 seconds.
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by Rocky Sharwell on Sun Mar 13, 2022 10:11 am
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Mark L wrote:E.J. is absolutely correct; real world benchmarks are necessary to really know how fast the configurations are and how they work for your use case.  However, I can tell you that I moved from a 6 year old desktop Windows PC to the new 14" MacBook Pro with the M1 max, full graphics and 64 GB memory in January.  I now use the laptop as my only computer (dock connecting to external drives, a large monitor, etc.) and love it.  The graphics performance with Photoshop, Lightroom Classic and the Topaz AI routines is really good and I have never run into a memory issue.

Clearly it will be possible to have more processing and graphics power if one chooses the M1 Ultra and more memory will be available.  How much either of these contributes to better performance needs to be demonstrated/tested. 

You have me thinking about the MacBook Pro as it would solve the problem of an old MB Pro-what size SSD? What dock? Thanks
Rocky Sharwell
 

by Mark L on Sun Mar 13, 2022 10:38 am
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My 14" MacBook Pro is as loaded as you can go, except for the SSD:
M1 Max with 10 core processor and 24 core GPU
64GB memory
2TB SSD

I use a Sony a7RIV so the image files are large and get huge if you take panoramas.  I don't swap machines often so I wanted to buy future proofing in terms of both memory and compute power.  For the SSD a 1TB would probably be fine, but I wanted to buy space to keep a fair number of images on the laptop at all times.
 

by bobsmith on Thu Jun 02, 2022 10:31 pm
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I ordered a 16” M1 Max with 32GB Ram and 1TB SSD… wishing I had gone with a 2TB SSD……but loving the performance!
 

by Brian Stirling on Mon Jun 06, 2022 7:11 am
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I picked up the M1 Max with 64GB RAM and 2TB storage. My editing of images and video had been done on a home built Windows/Intel box I built 6 years earlier my other PC is a high end 7 year old Dell laptop that still works, has a 4K screen, but the trackpad is delaminating and not functioning well.

So, the performance of the M1 Max MacBook Pro is quite a bit better than either but it should be for the price.


Brian
 

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