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Boro22

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 3, 2023
93
9
Hi what would you choose netween

32gb ram, m1 pro

Or m2 pro and 16gb ram.

The m2 pro is about £300 more expensive
 

russell_314

macrumors 604
Feb 10, 2019
6,675
10,277
USA
Impossible to answer if you don’t say what you’re going to use it for. If you don’t use the extra ram, then the processor speed would be slightly helpful.
 
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russell_314

macrumors 604
Feb 10, 2019
6,675
10,277
USA
excel, teams, YouTube

Excel files are quite large and I tend to have multiple running
I just saw where you mentioned the M2 was more expensive. I would go with M1 especially if it has more RAM.

I only use excel on occasion but I can’t imagine it using that much RAM. I’ll let someone else chime in on that though
 

herbert7265

macrumors regular
Jun 2, 2023
104
80
Mexico
Personally I would always first go for RAM, then SoC and / or SSD.

In this case, based on your stated usage, the difference in between the performance of the M1 and the M2 may not be that significant that it justifies such a higher price and you trade in RAM. But that’s just me…!

Herbert
 
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Kung

macrumors 6502
Feb 3, 2006
485
496
M1 Pro with 32GB, for a few reasons.

1. Having a better CPU is nice, but as many others have said, difference between M1 and M2 Pro is more incremental than anything.

2. M1 has 2x the RAM as the M2.

3. SSD read/write speeds with the M1 may actually be faster (given how they're using larger NAND chips, or whatever they call it, for the M2 configuration).
 

Boro22

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 3, 2023
93
9
thanks. Ram it is. the 32gb ram is a used MacBook Pro. it's a year old, does it come with two year warranty. I am concerned buying it and there is a major fault I don't spot
 

Chuckeee

macrumors 68040
Aug 18, 2023
3,066
8,733
Southern California
With a 2 year warranty you should be in great shape. Even If there is a major fault you will probably discover it within a few months, we’ll within the warranty period.
 

Boro22

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 3, 2023
93
9
sorry my question - does apple come as standard with 2 year warranty?
 

mzeb

macrumors 6502
Jan 30, 2007
362
621
The biggest advantage of the M2 Pro over the M1 Pro is the GPU. None of the tasks you mentioned are particularly graphically intensive. Given those two options I'd go with the M1 Pro.

Thatallsaid, if you're open to other options, it might be worth a look at the new M2 Air. It has two less CPU cores than the Pro but they are the same cores. And those are the cores that matter to you. You can spec it up to 24GB of RAM with a 512GB SSD for significantly less than the pro.

Finally, standard AppleCare on Macs is 1 year.
 

Isamilis

macrumors 68020
Apr 3, 2012
2,191
1,074
excel, teams, YouTube

Excel files are quite large and I tend to have multiple running
I couldn’t imagine, a M2 Mac with 16gb become slow because of running excel. But, assuming you open very large excel files and assuming Ms Excel for Mac has good memory management, I would get M1/32 GB.
 

mzeb

macrumors 6502
Jan 30, 2007
362
621
I thought we laid it to rest that the unified memory really makes the dedicatee ram question largely irrelevant.
Totally off topic but well... not really.

There's some interesting tradeoffs that I still haven't seen good data on. Gonna break this out into three parts:

Dedicated Memory, Shared Memory, Unified Memory

Dedicated Memory and Shared Memory function largely the same except that in shared memory instead of it's own dedicated hardware it sections off a chunk of RAM from the main memory hardware. Each has to copy things from "main" memory to video memory. The difference is when looking at dedicated GDDR7 you have a 1.5TB/S data pipeline to copy where as with shared LPDDR5 you're looking at about 500GB/s (and it's the same memory bus which slows things down further).

Unified memory is different than shared because instead of sectioning off memory it is all stored as one which means the CPU cores and GPU cores can access the same addresses. This is cool because you don't have to copy stuff between main and video memory. No copies speeds things up but it's still 500GB/s.

So the question is "which is faster?" If you have a workload that offloads a bunch of shaders and then proceeds to do most processing on the GPU the dedicated is going to be way faster because there isn't a lot of copies. If you are regularly switching out what would go into video memory the unified memory might very well be faster. And I haven't seen any good testing on this front to say one way or another.
 
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ilikewhey

macrumors 68040
May 14, 2014
3,616
4,680
nyc upper east
I couldn’t imagine, a M2 Mac with 16gb become slow because of running excel. But, assuming you open very large excel files and assuming Ms Excel for Mac has good memory management, I would get M1/32 GB.
lol it does not, everytime i open a excel file with over 400 rows and 20 columns my memory gets swapped. on my gaming pc with same ram space doesn't.
 
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