I would *really* like to upgrade from my 16" M1P, but it depends heavily on the family CFO
www.macrumors.com
I second this. Really the only thing that would get me to consider upgrading.
Same, I will stick with mine until I no longer receive updates that actually peak my interest. So even if the first MacOS that comes out that isn't available to this machine has new features that I really dont care too much about (like this latest MacOS), I'll continue to hold off. After that, I will probably go with a 15" Air, since I only upgraded from the M1 Air to the 16" M1 Pro MBP for screen size really (15" Air wasn't available at that time). The base M1 suited my power needs just fine. But now I miss how thin and light that machine was compared to the M1.Well I’m staying with my base 14” M1 MBP (16/512) for at least next 5 years.
Just kind of throwing this out there. And I do realize there are folks doing intensive tasks that would benefit from every bit of additional speed. Someone mentioned in this thread that the improvement in single core performance was massive. It is, at least in benchmarks. But for most of the things most of us do most of the time it's completely moot. I'm generally the bottleneck on my M1 Pro. It generally doesn't matter if internal processing is at the M1 speed, or is twice as fast. It has no practical significance. Things like screen size and quality, ability to drive external monitors, SSD size, etc. are of much more practical significance for a lot of users. Again, I know there are folks who really do benefit from the processing speed increases. But ...
I was thinking of the 14 inch as well but learnt that the 14 inch cause the laptop performance to take a hit due to it smaller size.. it gets hotter faster and gets throttle down. That perfomance will take 15-30% hit when peforming some tasks. Still I would prefer the 14inch as easier to carry than the large 16 inch like a giant desktop when travelling for safaris or mountain expedition coming up. I am still debating.
I have an M2 with plenty of RAM so I am more than happy. My guess is that the M1 folks who will see real benefit from upgrading will be those who run apps like Blender that take advantage of hardware ray tracing, etc. specific to the newer chips. Or those folks who failed to put enough RAM in their M1 Macs.
Thanks for your correction!
The appeal of Thunderbolt for me is not about monitors. It is because soon, one will be able to plug in a Thunderbolt 5 drive - and in a year or so maybe even a compact T-5 thumb drive, and run the OS efficiently off that drive. Currently it costs US$50 for some 1 TB NVME drives. Because Apple doesn't allow upgrading the internal drive, Thunderbolt 5 is a game changer IMO. Apple introduced in MacBook Pros Thunderbolt 3 in 2016 - 8 years ago. Thunderbolt 4 did not increase data transfer speeds over Thunderbolt 3. But Thunderbolt 5 doubles data transfer speeds over Thunderbolt 3 and 4. It's a big step IMO. However external T-5 devices will be expensive for a considerable time ... but they will become more affordable, and they will extend the utility of Apple's hardware a great deal IMO, as Apple's devices seem to be all modelled on notebook design.
Any Apple Silicon MBP with 16 GB RAM will be a good upgrade compared to the 2019 MBP. More RAM will always be better in your use case, but the M4 Pro should provide a very significant CPU and GPU upgrade compared to the 8th gen Intel CPU.
The 16" inch costs much the same in that very high specification, and has two fans rather than one, and the 16" has been shown to have considerably better cooling. Despite the extra bulk, for desktop use the 16" makes more sense IMO. It would run quieter too because of its better cooling.
