Experiences with 14” M4 Max

[macman4789]

Hi,

With the new MacBooks out now for over a month, I wondered if anyone could share their experiences with the 14 inch particularly with the M4 Max. A lot has been said about whether the thermals can fully utilise the chip to its potential etc (as it does every year with a Max chip in the 14”) and I wondered what your real world experiences were of using it?

When it’s out through its paces in video editing, 3D rendering, photo work, have you noticed any bottlenecks or dips in performance?

Thanks

 

[Traverse]

So I've been looking into this topic as well because I'm considering updating my MacBook. When these first came out there were several posts linking to a YouTube video that I believe ultimately had an error in one of the graphs that was showing extreme performance differences and even instances where the M4 Pro chip was outperforming the M4 Max which seem ridiculous.

I finally found a good comparison video (see below) that was just posted recently that compared the 14" and 16" MacBook Pro with the fully specced M4 Max chips and I was very happy with the results. In all of the these the 14" and 16" were essentially identical.

I think what you're more likely to notice is that the fans will definitely come on more readily with the 14" model and it may run a bit hotter. I'm sure there is some throttling difference between the two, but the difference I think are greatly exaggerated. If your workload is only requires occasional pushes then I think they both will be fine. If we're going to to encounter 24-hours of video or train LLM models then I'd almost recommend a desktop as opposed to a laptop which will always have some thermal constraints.

 

[macman4789]

So I've been looking into this topic as well because I'm considering updating my MacBook. When these first came out there were several posts linking to a YouTube video that I believe ultimately had an error in one of the graphs that was showing extreme performance differences and even instances where the M4 Pro chip was outperforming the M4 Max which seem ridiculous.

I finally found a good comparison video (see below) that was just posted recently that compared the 14" and 16" MacBook Pro with the fully specced M4 Max chips and I was very happy with the results. In all of the these the 14" and 16" were essentially identical.

I think what you're more likely to notice is that the fans will definitely come on more readily with the 14" model and it may run a bit hotter. I'm sure there is some throttling difference between the two, but the difference I think are greatly exaggerated. If your workload is only requires occasional pushes then I think they both will be fine. If we're going to to encounter 24-hours of video or train LLM models then I'd almost recommend a desktop as opposed to a laptop which will always have some thermal constraints.

Thanks for this video. Hadn’t seen this - shows very similar performance to the 16” which is a big deal as the previous 14” Max chips seemed to be affected performance wise.