Needed, good advice for my 1st Macbook

[Moriske]

Is a standard MBP M4 sufficient for me now?

As an amateur photographer, I have been working with Photomator, i-Movie and soon Pixelmator Pro for some time.
My daily workhorse is a MacMini M2 Pro, 32gb ram and 1TB SSD with large 40” screen.

Since I also want to process some photos and videos on the move, my choice is MBP M4.
For heavy and most work, the Mac mini remains the workhorse in the house.

When choosing an MBP, I would not like to run into the limits for the first few years and also have no further idea what impact apple intelligence will have on the specs.

On the MBP M4 I will mainly process compressed raw's (+/-25MB) from a Sony A7III and in iMovie 4K video material. Furthermore, from the comfort of my armchair (seat) movie streaming, word processing, spreadsheets, YouTube and safari.

Configuration MB Pro.
- M4
- Memory 16GB or 24GB
- SSD 512GB or 1TB

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

 

[Fishrrman]

MBP m4pro.
36gb RAM.
1tb SSD.

...for the 4k video and compressed RAWs...

 

[Moriske]

MBP m4pro.
36gb RAM.
1tb SSD.

...for the 4k video and compressed RAWs...

I'm following this YouTuber's advice.
By the time I need the power of the M4 Pro on a daily basis, the need for a new upgrade will be more likely. This means I opt for the configuration below.

MB Pro M4
- M4
- Memory 24GB
- SSD 1TB

Reason!
I find working from a laptop with external drives inconvenient, especially when I like to use the MB Pro as a laptop in my recliner or chair. Then (with the same budget) I would rather invest in a 1TB SSD and extra RAM instead of an M4 Pro chip. In short, prefer an M4 and not sitting around fiddling with an external SSD, an external SSD I prefer to use as extra storage or Backups with Time Machine or to the Mac mini.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

I find working from a laptop with external drives inconvenient, especially when I like to use the MB Pro as a laptop in my recliner or chair.

Totally agree. External is fine on a Mac mini but with a MacBook - make sure you have enough internal storage for your normal use.

 

[ChrisA]

Totally agree. External is fine on a Mac mini but with a MacBook - make sure you have enough internal storage for your normal use.

Even more useful than a large internal SSD is a really good WiFi network and NAS. Then your photos live on the NAS, not the computer. This is important if you have two computers as it saves copying the files and trying to remember which computer has the most recent change. The NAS is even more important if you use an iPad (using an iPad with an external disk is not fun.)

I own way too many computers as I am working in robotics and have Mac computers and Linux inside the robots. Same with the 3D printers, they are Linux based. You would think I might lose a file and not remember which computer holds it. But no. The files live on the NAS so I work with the same file (not a copy) on every device.