Recommendations for a new MacBook

TidBITS Talk
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A comment from @gingerbeardman in another thread about waiting for an M5 MBP to come out made me think to ask for other opinions on this. My trusty MBP M1 Pro is easily the best Mac I’ve ever had. But, as always, I feel the need for (more) speed. Specifically in Xcode tasks, but overall snappiness is always welcome. My current machine is just over four years old, so I’m looking.

I see there is an MBP M5, but no “Pro” or “Max” version yet (I presume this is what Matt was referring to). So, opinions: should I wait (“It won’t be that much faster”), get the M5 (“if you need something now, don’t assume the M5 will have Pro and Max versions), or wait (“if you have an M1 Pro now, you’ll want the M5 Pro, and it’s definitely coming soon”)?

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If you don’t already know about MacRumors, it has good “buy or wait” guides I find useful whenever I’m thinking about an Apple purchase:

MacRumors also writes summaries of Mark Gurman’s weekly Apple rumors and predictions newsletter that is published by Bloomberg (I’m assuming most people here aren’t Bloomberg subscribers). I find Gurman to be well connected to Apple insiders and less interested in being an influencer than a lot of other online Apple commentators.

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As is always the case, the question comes down to “what do you want to do with it?”.

If you’re like me, and just use it for office/productivity apps (MS Office, FileMaker, Photoshop Elements, scanning documents), playing media and web surfing, every model sold will have plenty of power. The only reason to get more than the base-model processor is for future-proofing - as software evolves, hardware requirements increase, so a more powerful processor will give you more time before replacement becomes necessary.

If you use it for high-power apps like audio/video editing or ML design/development, then you will want the latest and greatest processor. But I suspect that if you were in this category, you wouldn’t feel a need to ask the question.

And, as is the case with all current-issue Macs, equip it with as much RAM and storage as your budget allows. RAM is not upgradable, and storage can only be expanded with external (slower) media. If you can’t afford to max-out both, I recommend maxing out the RAM first, and use external storage if you can’t also buy as much storage as you’d like. Mostly because RAM is not expandable, but storage is.

Your specific situation?

Building code will benefit greatly from a faster processor (especially more CPU cores), but also from a lot of RAM. I would argue that anything sold today will be a big upgrade from your M1 Pro, but ultimately, I think you’ll see more benefit from more cores and more RAM than a faster processor.

A quick summary of the SoCs (all are using ARMv9 cores), for comparison:

SoC # Cores RAM
M4 8 (4 performance, 4 efficiency)
9 (3p, 6e)
10 (4p, 6e)		 8, 16, 24, 32GB
M4 Pro 12 (8p, 4e)
14 (10p, 4e)		 24, 48, 64 GB
M4 Max 14 (10p, 4e)
16 (12p, 4e)		 36, 48, 64, 128 GB
M5 10 (4p, 6e) 12, 16, 24, 32

For your application, I would suggest that an M4 Pro (or Max, if you can afford it) will serve you better than a base M5. This is because you will have more cores (12, 14 or 16, vs. the M5’s 10), more performance cores (8, 10 or 12, vs. the M5’s 4) and you can get a lot more RAM: The M4 Pro goes up to 64GB and the Max can go to 128 GB, while the M5 only goes up to 32 GB

It’s been my experience that when developing large software projects, the greatest benefit is from having a lot of RAM and a lot of CPU cores. The performance of individual cores is of lesser importance, unless there’s a massive speed difference.

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I’m in a similar situation. I have an MacBook Pro M1 Max 64GB 2TB. I’m waiting for the M5 Max, as I want to get as much performance from the new machine as possible. Given Apple’s cadence since the M-series debut, a M5 Max MacBook Pro is due around April. For me it is worth waiting.