I started off wanting a 15” M3 MacBook Air 16GB 1TB, but after the spec bump it seemed silly not to spend a little more for the 14” M3 MacBook Pro 16GB 1TB.
Watching a load of YouTubers and reading many posts I now think bumping up the RAM would be sensible for longevity and my use case, so I’m now trying to decide between the 14” M3 MacBook Pro 24GB 1TB, and the 14” M3 Pro MacBook Pro 11 core 18GB 1TB, both around £2300, which is stretching the budget.
Apple on Amazon has the M3 Pro spec with the 12-core CPU / 18-core GPU for £2229, which is 11% off. This is very tempting. I just feel the 18GB of RAM might not be good for longevity and my use case.
Theres not much in the UK Apple refurbished store.
My use case for the M3 MacBook will be the typical email, browsing with many tabs, content consumption, plus astrophotography image stacking of 10’s to 100’s of RAW files in one go to create a single RAW file which will be edited in the likes of Lightroom, Photoshop, PixInsight (it’s a new hobby). The stacking and some of the processing tricks like CPU cores, and Lightroom etc. likes RAM.
As well as image processing, I will do a little iMovie video editing currently only with 1080p files, I want to connect it to at least 1 x 4K screen, I will run Parallels for Windows 11 and SQL Server Management Studio, and will dabble with programming.
36GB of RAM would sit better with me, but I don’t think I can stretch that far. Which M3 machine do I get? Are the extra advantages of the M3 Pro worth sacrificing 6GB of RAM?
Watching a load of YouTubers and reading many posts I now think bumping up the RAM would be sensible for longevity and my use case, so I’m now trying to decide between the 14” M3 MacBook Pro 24GB 1TB, and the 14” M3 Pro MacBook Pro 11 core 18GB 1TB, both around £2300, which is stretching the budget.
Apple on Amazon has the M3 Pro spec with the 12-core CPU / 18-core GPU for £2229, which is 11% off. This is very tempting. I just feel the 18GB of RAM might not be good for longevity and my use case.
Theres not much in the UK Apple refurbished store.
My use case for the M3 MacBook will be the typical email, browsing with many tabs, content consumption, plus astrophotography image stacking of 10’s to 100’s of RAW files in one go to create a single RAW file which will be edited in the likes of Lightroom, Photoshop, PixInsight (it’s a new hobby). The stacking and some of the processing tricks like CPU cores, and Lightroom etc. likes RAM.
As well as image processing, I will do a little iMovie video editing currently only with 1080p files, I want to connect it to at least 1 x 4K screen, I will run Parallels for Windows 11 and SQL Server Management Studio, and will dabble with programming.
36GB of RAM would sit better with me, but I don’t think I can stretch that far. Which M3 machine do I get? Are the extra advantages of the M3 Pro worth sacrificing 6GB of RAM?
