Hi all. Would I see a significant difference in performance jumping from M1 to M1 Max? Thanks!
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Is it worth upgrading from M1 mini to Studio M1 Max?
- Thread starter VitoBotta
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You will definitely see a jump in performance, especially in GPU heavy tasks. But I you don't have a workflow that would take advantage of this power, you probably would not see the difference
What do you use the computer for?
No idea what you use your Mac for. If it's CPU & GPU intensive stuff then you'd see a bit of a difference.
I forgot to mention: mostly web development with Docker etc. I don't do video editing or games so I am mostly interested in the CPU performance difference
Stick with the Mini. When I went from the M1 MacBook Pro to the M1Max I saw no difference in my day to day at all. I returned it in favor of the M1Pro. It's not really much faster but the overall package is worth it. I have an M1 mini and my big complaint is that the M1's don't seem to do very well at swapping memory. With many apps when I hit the 16GB wall it stumbles then locks up. Bot my Mini and my M1Pro14. I do with I had gone with 32GB on the M1Pro but I did not want a CTO. By Pro, Apple seems to have relegated that tag to a small but vocal group with very specific workflows. I would love to have a crazy fast machine to handle my 3D lighting simulations, Bluebeam, Revit, etc. But alas those are all Windows based and I can either stay with my iMac Pro, 16" i9, or just use my Thinkpad. My Mac has been pushed aside from my "pro" tasks, and basically handles my personal video and Lightroom needs.
I don't do any graphics stuff at all really... so for me it's about CPU performance mostly. M1 and M1 Pro/Max have the same single core performance. I am not sure how much I would benefit for more cores that's why I wonder if it's worth upgrading to the Studio M1 Max.
I work from home 99% of the time, I go to the office just twice a month and the Intel MBP 16" is fine for that. So something like the mini or the studio are perfect for me
If you use a test runner that can can use the extra cores and your tests are written to take advantage of this, then it could make a difference depending on your workflow.
I use jest which is multi-threaded so double the cores would increase the speed. For my projects, units tests takes like 20 to 60 seconds to run so I would expect the M ultra to decrease this by 130% to 200%. I would need to run some benchmarks to confirm my hypothesis. I hate waiting for unit tests so this would be tempting for me although I don't know if it would make complete sense financially.
I believe some UI test runners like playwright can also run test in parallel so that should also help. We use cypress which unfortunately does not do this when running locally.
I don't run the full suite locally often actually, for that there's the CI. I run it sometimes but usually it's the tests I am working on that I run locally.
I mean power performance-wise the Mini would be fine (I do web dev too), the only reason to move to the Studio would be the ability to get 32G+ of RAM.
I just upgraded from M1 Mac Mini 16GB to Mac Studio M1 Max with 64GB. My M1 has been struggling with ram using large image scans in Photoshop, going into red memory all the time getting really slow and unresponsive.
I usually do this as well, but I do usually run a complete suite of unit tests before uploading to make sure nothing unexpected broke. I don't like uploading to CI and then finding out a unit test broke 20-30 minutes later.
I would consider running the UI/integrations tests before uploading as well if they didn't take 20 minutes to run. As it is now, I have to wait like an hour or so to find out if any UI tests broke as well. I have usually moved on by then and I won't find out about a broken UI test possibly until several hours later.
With 16GB I see high memory pressure sometimes but it doesn't seem to cause any actual issues memory-wise.
Yeah I don't do any graphics so the graphics performance wouldn't be an important thing for me.
I know I am. I'm enjoying the performance improvements I'm seeing with Blender 3.1 Metal-enabled... renders "Classroom" from a little over 11 min. (CPU only) to under 5 min. (CPU+GPU)!
I'm curious if upgrading would help me as well, but I think it probably won't. Going to have some envy for my wife's new MacBook Pro M1 Max, 64GB RAM. My wife does a lot of work with Photoshop and Lightroom, so she definitely will benefit from the M1 Max.
I realize it's not of much benefit if at all for web browsing, email, etc. I frequently open 600+ page Word and PDF documents and the M1 sometimes gets a little sluggish scrolling through them. It's tolerable, but annoying. Usually I have Chrome, Excel, etc. open simultaneously.
It's my understanding that Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Word can't use multiple processors simultaneously.
16gb of memory would improve your experience more than anything else.
Fwiw, from a performance perspective, other than the base memory going up, virtually no benefit to you from pro/max/ultra. Though no downside other than $$, ;-).
I have 16 GB of memory currently.
Yea but believe the reason why they released the Studio is 3D/Art producers that could do great work with 3D art!
I would stick with the M1 for now, wait and see what comes about by the end of the year...
Best benefit of the M1 Pro would be the 32GB RAM, but a new M2 Mac mini might allow a 32GB RAM capacity...?
I think the M2 will still stop at 16GB; it should just be a faster version of the same chip.