MacBook Pro M3 Pro or M4 Pro
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I need your advice with this two MacBook Pro. I live in Mexico and I want to buy a MacBook Pro for software development. I’m between MacBook Pro M3 16" with 12 CPU, 18 GPU, 512 GB and 18 GB RAM (price $2,200 USD) and MacBook Pro M4 14" with 12 CPU, 16 GPU, 512 GB and 24 GB RAM (price $2,400 USD), which do you recommend to buy it?
Thanks.
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Professional software engineer here.
All the M series of MBP are overkills from M1 Pro. The benchmarks are worthless for all practical purposes.
What matters is RAM. I generally recommend 32gb if you are professional. If that's too expensive, anything over 16gb should last you a long time (enough time for you to figure out what you want).
16gb for college students (before your first real job because you have a budget). 24gb or 32gb for anyone else in the field. 24gb for non work laptop for professional engineer makes the most sense.
24gb is the best option of your list. If you can find M2 or M3 Pro for 32gb that would be ideal for a good price.
I say this because for software development, docker and IntelliJ just loooooove RAM for some reason.
Software engineering is NOT CPU intensive. And any serious GPU work would be done on the Cloud. And for the people working on the latter, they are already making a lot of money (my friend on paper makes over 2 million dollars a year).
I do work in software industry and data analytics and believe it or not my MacBook Pro easily crushes cloud services like google colab. That's jut the tip of the iceberg! I have a giant database on my laptop and I can easily execute pySpark tasks on it. I very much prefer my local setup far more than "cloud".
My tasks are pretty CPU/GPU/RAM/HDD intensive. What doesn't matter to me is the monitor!
Thank you for your valuable advice
With docker you can manage memory consumption but if you're working with Java (you mentioned IntelliJ) then JVM tuning could also be another option to minimize memory consumption significantly
Hola amigo! I’d say go for the M4 Pro. You mentioned software development, right? The M4 Pro better suits you.
M4 Pro Macbook Pro gives you 8 Performance cores and 2 Efficiency cores which is better than the M3 Pro cores (it has more E cores which makes it slower). Plus you get more ram for less the price. You’re also getting more battery life with the M4 and you’re getting access to a better NPU. Don’t buy the M3 Pro since it’d be obsolete pretty soon, many people bought it and are refunding it.
There was a X code benchmark and I believe the M4 Pro finished 70 seconds faster than the M3 Pro while building the project. Who even cares what those numbers mean, at the end of the day the M4 is faster, lasts longer, can do more and is much better for the same price range.
Hope I could help!
The M3 pro is a 1 year old machine, don't know why you think it'll be obsolete "pretty soon".
I depends on your needs, and your priorities. performance is gonna be better on the M4 pro is gonna be better but if your work load doesn’t require it and you want a bigger battery, a bigger screen, bigger speakers, and you’re not the most concerned about using the ports and data transfer speeds then I’d say go for the 16 in and for those extra 200 you can get 1TB of ssd and make it to where you don’t need or won’t for a little bit require an external ssd. But again it’s on your needs, I would say if your workload doesn’t need it, I’d go for the bigger Mac
I asked Apple about this last night and they said: I would like to brief you that the M4 is better than the M3 chip base variant and not the M3 pro chip.
So, the M3 Pro chip is better than the base M4.
The m4 pro has a upgrade to 24 gb ram for free, it’s currently 1789 on amazon
D Fjo