M4 w/32gigs vs M4 Pro w/24gigs

[Shiva77]

I am leaning towards buying the new M4 MacBook Pro with 32 gigs of RAM. I use my MacBook for pretty much everything from mild video editing, to zoom calls with multiple users, with both Safari and chrome websites open to multiple websites.
I’m wondering if going to the M4 pro with 24 gigs would be a better choice? I guess I’m from the old Windows school where more ram was always better than processor speed. There is not a huge price difference between the M4 pro with 24gigs and the M4 with 32 gigs.
In a nutshell, my question is: is it better to get an M4 with lots of RAM compared to an M4 pro with less RAM?

 

[cassmr]

The m4 pro is a pretty big step up in performance. I think it would be hard to find workloads where the 24gb pro was any worse than the m4 with 32. They no doubt exist but would be niche. The pro would be noticably better in most use cases. Although very simple day to day tasks, like email, web browsing unlikely any different.

Given they are the same price, personally, it'd be the m4 pro all day.

Would also be helpful to know what current mac you have?

 

[Shiva77]

In Canadian dollars, the M4 with a 1 terabyte hard drive and 32 gigs of RAM is $2849. The M4 pro with 24 gigs RAM and 1 terabyte is $2950. So only $100 more but much less Ram. I’m upgrading from a 2019 MacBook Air with a i5 processor and only eight gigs of RAM, too many spinning wheels!

 

[cassmr]

I dont know if i'd call 24 gb 'much less' ram than 32. For most people and most tasks 16 is more than sufficient (keeping in mind plenty of people seemed satisified with 8gb, even if they would have preferred or noticed a benefit with more), 24 provides some good future proofing. 32, honestly is a bit of a waste on an m4 chip, as the advantages of that extra ram are likely to be bottle-necked more by the CPU than the ram.

Ram is a weird upgrade, it can make a significant difference or none at all. If you arent using that extra ram, it wont make your machine any faster.

 

[bzgnyc2]

I'd be curious what others make of a slightly different tradeoff: Mac Mini M2 Pro w/32GB/512GB versus Mac Mini M4 w/32GB/512GB?

Right now the former is going $1439 refurb while the latter is $1199. The M2 Pro has 200MB/sec memory bandwidth versus 120MB/sec on the M4 [base] but M4 performance cores are still up to 50% faster than M2 performance cores. Similarly guessing the M4's GPU are faster than the M2 Pro's but the latter has 16 GPU versus 10 on the M4 [base].

For those whose software uses the NPU, M4's NPU is simply >2x faster plus I am guessing additional capabilities that come from a new generation. Similarly for those who need AV1 decode or do ray tracing the M4 is also a no brainer. On the flip side the M2 Pro's 4xTB4 versus M4's 3xTB4 and front-facing USB-C are obvious upsides for the M2 Pro though I doubt deciding for most people.

Did the Mac Mini M2 Pro have any other advantages over the Mac Mini M4 [base] such that you would pay extra for the former or even the same?

 

[iau]

I have the same question. Currently using a MacBook Air M1 with 16GB RAM and 1 TB storage. The only demanding use I have is with Lightroom Classic and photo editing. I don't do any video editing and not larger batch processing in Lightroom.

I feel that it will probably work fine for another year until the next upgrade, but the USB-C ports are getting a little sluggish, disconnecting my external drives and a couple of keys are sometimes less responsive.

Pros with the M4 Pro for me is Thunderbolt 5 and two fans (as I hear they are likely to make less noise than one in the base M4). I lovehow silent my Air M1 is and have considered waiting for an M4 chip, but the extra port and card reader is nice to have. I sometimes connect it to an external display.

 

[fw85]

I have the same question. Currently using a MacBook Air M1 with 16GB RAM and 1 TB storage. The only demanding use I have is with Lightroom Classic and photo editing. I don't do any video editing and not larger batch processing in Lightroom.

I feel that it will probably work fine for another year until the next upgrade, but the USB-C ports are getting a little sluggish, disconnecting my external drives and a couple of keys are sometimes less responsive.

Pros with the M4 Pro for me is Thunderbolt 5 and two fans (as I hear they are likely to make less noise than one in the base M4). I lovehow silent my Air M1 is and have considered waiting for an M4 chip, but the extra port and card reader is nice to have. I sometimes connect it to an external display.

The M4 base model is also dead silent, I've yet to hear the fan. And if your heaviest use case is photo editing, you likely won't ever hear the fan either.

The M4 Pro may have two fans, but it's way more thermally demanding as well, with its 8 perf + 4 efficiency cores vs 4 perf + 6 efficiency cores.

 

[bzgnyc2]

I'd be curious what others make of a slightly different tradeoff: Mac Mini M2 Pro w/32GB/512GB versus Mac Mini M4 w/32GB/512GB?

Right now the former is going $1439 refurb while the latter is $1199. The M2 Pro has 200MB/sec memory bandwidth versus 120MB/sec on the M4 [base] but M4 performance cores are still up to 50% faster than M2 performance cores. Similarly guessing the M4's GPU are faster than the M2 Pro's but the latter has 16 GPU versus 10 on the M4 [base].

For those whose software uses the NPU, M4's NPU is simply >2x faster plus I am guessing additional capabilities that come from a new generation. Similarly for those who need AV1 decode or do ray tracing the M4 is also a no brainer. On the flip side the M2 Pro's 4xTB4 versus M4's 3xTB4 and front-facing USB-C are obvious upsides for the M2 Pro though I doubt deciding for most people.

Did the Mac Mini M2 Pro have any other advantages over the Mac Mini M4 [base] such that you would pay extra for the former or even the same?

I found one use case where the M2 Pro beats the M4 all else being equal: LLM

Performance of llama.cpp on Apple Silicon M-series · ggerganov llama.cpp · Discussion #4167

Summary LLaMA 7B BW [GB/s] GPU Cores F16 PP [t/s] F16 TG [t/s] Q8_0 PP [t/s] Q8_0 TG [t/s] Q4_0 PP [t/s] Q4_0 TG [t/s] ✅ M1 1 68 7 108.21 7.92 107.81 14.19 ✅ M1 1 68 8 117.25 7.91 117.96 14.15 ✅ M1...

github.com

As current LLM are memory bandwidth bound, the M2 Pro's advantages there mean that it would be a better choice over the M4 for someone heavily engaged in that type of work (but for whatever reason can't justify the cost of a larger Mac or get a PC).

 

[iJny9956]

I have a dumb question. There are a lot of questions around ram.

For me I’m running say 2 4k monitors. Would it be wise to get extra ram since this is also video memory?

Just trying to understand if having more ram would help the gpu out in anyway.

 

[fw85]

I have a dumb question. There are a lot of questions around ram.

For me I’m running say 2 4k monitors. Would it be wise to get extra ram since this is also video memory?

Just trying to understand if having more ram would help the gpu out in anyway.

Running a 4k display is rather negligible in terms of VRAM consumed, it's going to be like 200mb of VRAM reserved for the frame buffers and such.
Focus on the apps, how memory demanding they are and how many of them you need to run at once.

 

[iJny9956]

Focus on the apps

Thanks for getting back. I really appreciate it.

So on a machine that has 16gb for example. I should see 8gb for Mac OS and rest of 8gb to be for apps? Is this a way to look at it and not worry about VRAM?

 

[raythompsontn]

So on a machine that has 16gb for example. I should see 8gb for Mac OS and rest of 8gb to be for apps?

MacOS will take whatever is available. Loading as much into memory as the OS thinks will be needed. That memory will be released when apps need the memory, or in the worst case, swapped out to disc. Which is not really a concern. MacOS does not take that much memory as machines with 8GB ran just fine with many apps. 16GB will suffice for the overwhelming majority of applications.

Swap is used when an app is not active and another app needs more memory. Switching to another app will generally idle the background app. There are exceptions of course for those running video rendering, code generation, etc. that can run in the background. Because the swapped app is generally not running, there is little to no performance hit. Swapping an app back into memory will be so fast it will not be an issue.

You can check the memory pressure if you want. If you get a lot in the red for extended periods that would be a concern. Memory pressure in the yellow doesn't really matter.

If you can afford more memory, pay for it. It won't hurt. For almost everyone except for some heavy hitters, 24GB or 32GB is more than enough. I do a lot of photo processing with Lightroom and Photoshop. With 24GB the memory use is always in the low green. Truth be told I could by quite well on 16GB. It is just the 24GB is what the Apple Store had in stock.