MacBooks with M1/2/3 question

[fitcious]

Hi all,

Looking to buy a mac with apple silicon. Here’s my question.

I currently have a iPad Pro 1Tb/16gig m1 and it’s still quite fast. Apps open instantly and so do web pages. Battery is pretty great.

Will a mac with a m2 pro processor provide the same snappy performance as my iPad Pro? Instant app opening? Almost instant page loading? Or is the snappiness of my iPad due to iPadOS rather than the processor and macOS will always be slower?

I have a 2020 MBA with i7/16 gig ram and it’s enough for my usage but I feel the fan runs quite often, usability isn’t as smooth as I hoped and battery is just OK.

I plan on getting a used MBP with M2 pro and 16gig/512. If the snappiness and battery is similar to my MBA then I’ll just wait for a M3 iPad Pro.

Thanks!

 

[Mcdevidr]

There is no m2 pro MacBook Pro with 8gb ram. Any m series is gonna be faster and quieter than your Air.

 

[fitcious]

There is no m2 pro MacBook Pro with 8gb ram. Any m series is gonna be faster and quieter than your Air.

Thanks you’re right, it’s 16gig.

I understand it will be faster and quieter than my current MBA, but will it be faster than my iPad Pro with m1 and 16 gig ram?

 

[eldho]

Faster than instant????

 

[mr_roboto]

Will a mac with a m2 pro processor provide the same snappy performance as my iPad Pro? Instant app opening? Almost instant page loading? Or is the snappiness of my iPad due to iPadOS rather than the processor and macOS will always be slower?

iPadOS and macOS are essentially two versions of the same OS. Apple Silicon Macs are very snappy.

Will it be the same in all possible circumstances? No, and the reason why cuts to the policy differences between iPadOS and macOS (in terms of technical capability they are rapidly converging). On the Mac, you personally are far more in charge of what goes on. When you let a program that's chewing up some CPU and memory keep running in the background, macOS assumes you know what you're doing and are OK if the resources consumed by background apps cause the current foreground app to be less snappy.

iOS/iPadOS have a different policy. They assume you always want the foreground app to get nearly everything it wants, and take active steps to ensure it does. Background apps are very limited in how much CPU they can use, and if the OS decides it needs to free more memory for the foreground app, it can force background apps to silently save their current state to disk and quit. (Later, when you try to flip back to such an app, it actually has to relaunch and load from its saved state.)

Apple has tried to introduce some of that kind of thing in macOS, but not a lot, because Mac users traditionally do want a full multitasking environment, and would complain if you took it away. So you're the captain of the ship: if you load your Mac down by leaving hundreds of browser tabs open in dozens of windows at all times, well, you might not have as snappy an experience as someone who closes things when done with them. (Especially if you use something other than Safari; Safari does a lot more to keep its resource use down compared to browsers like Chrome.)