I beg your pardon! That's totally uncalled for.

I'm agreeing with that getting 2nd hand Macs can be an excellent strategy for some. Maybe less so for people that have their own companies. There's also the possibility to lease, even for individuals in many countries.

Absolutely. While I've found a few ways to overload an M1 core, I also learned to avoid that to some extent, so I'm not sure somewhat faster single cores would gain me much. At best I could always work at a 32-64 audio buffer, but 128 is good enough. The minor issues I do have seems to be limited to specific pieces of tools, so abandoning those seems more cost-effective.

Yeah Im not complaining. My initial post was not to be taken serious. Just that it alwys seems exoensive to upgrade on apples site compared to when we could do it ourselves.
But for me Apple is the only choice.
And as you say there is ways to pay for it. Even if you get lesser specs for the money the quality is for me often better in the long run

Macbook Pro M2 13”
A few days into transitioning with my new Macbook Pro M2 (8/256 Gb) & early reports = I’m damned impressed if not blown away .

Coming from 10 core i9 10850 windows desktop using Ableton Live 10 , the Macbook Pro M2 is matching , if not bettering desktop performance-
loading the same projects that were beginning to crap out @ live cpu meter 70% @ 64 or 128 buffer on desktop they are running 15-20% less cpu meter & even drops cpu meter when lowering ! buffer & feeling more stable .(now on Live11 on macbook pro running mostly Native I believe )
Projects are mostly @10 softsynths (U-he Diva /Zebra , Pigments ), Superior Drummer2 & loads of FabFilter, Eventide, Sugarbytes Fx.

I felt obliged to buy now , as I wanted a laptop & worrying about coming rising winter fuel bills - part of my self justification was saving studio electricity bill & by charging thru nighttime low tarif the battery is lasting a day’s studio session with whole studio now only 108watts /h consumption .
Grateful to Amazon’s interest free 5 monthly instalment scheme - ideally I would have preferred 16Gb RAM but this was not an available option &
I couldn’t stretch to 14” M1 Pro - their cheapest 16Gb option included in installment scheme .
Most of my projects are only 4- 6 Gb so hasn’t seemed to be a problem yet .

Early days but very encouraged by performance !
- though I am getting frustrated by Apple’s OS quirks ;
hidden Library accessed by secret Option key in Finder Go ! wtf?
long filenames squashed into ridiculously short text boxes ?
Dock won’t always open when I bounce with pointer , but top menu drops down when I don’t want it to…. sigh ..oh well

Very nice. So, three weeks later how’s it going? Are you still enjoying it?

It's doing everything I needed it to to do and then some, absolutely no issues, rock solid and power on tap, I still find it hard to get my head around how much this can do when it's so small in size, and it doesn't seem to get hot or even warm at all! and it's totally silent!

I’ve been geting 5-6 years of life out of apple laptops, and that’s professional use, it goes in and out of a backpack most days.
I’ve never had a drive wear out, nor memory failure.
You pay more but you get stability and durability. Apple isn’t the onlycomputer manufacturer that makes high-quality machines, but they are the biggest, so PCs with the same build quality cost at least the same, often more.
The MacBook Air was never a strong work machine, so even with the upgrades, this is about as cheap as a useable work mac has ever been.
But it’s not as cheap as a cheap computer.
Just as a 100hp Dacia is always gonna be cheaper than a 100hp volkswagen or tesla.
.

It's not uncommon to see 8-10 years from an Apple laptop (my brother got 12 years out of his old iBooks, although once the OS stops receiving security updates and you can't upgrade to a newer OS it's best to shut them off from the internet). Until recently, a clothing manufacturer in my town was running the entire business except for Internet front end on 1990s-era Bondi blue iMacs running OS 9.

Good PC laptops can do the same or more; I always got at least 10 years from my ThinkPads; once I couldn't update them to a newer version of Windows I just converted them to Linux and got another 5+ years out of them.

Depending on the kind of music you work with, you can get by with a pretty low-spec machine. I mainly work with acoustic music, limited track count (rarely more than 10-12 tracks), so a M1 or M2 Air is far more than enough for my needs.

The Apple Silicon is absolutely amazing. I never liked Macs but with the M1, it's incredible. To me, it sounds so good and it has core audio built right in so no messing with drivers! Also, the battery life is incredible. The thing lasts forever. I never carry the charger with me anymore. My PC laptop will get 4 hours if I am lucky working on audio on battery. I don't know if there is going to be much of a noticable difference between the M1 and M2 for audio work unless you are doing some crazy amount of plug ins. I have the 8GB M1 Macbook Pro and I have never hit a limit with it. I barely touch the CPU. You may want to consider getting an M1 with more memory than the M2 with the higher price tag. I think most of the benefit will be from heavy video editing or really intensive stuff. I don't know how much it's going to benefit audio. But if you want to spend the money and have the fastest out, go for it. All I know is that it's going to be years before I even get close to hitting any limit on my M1 it's so powerful.

Ableton recently released an optimized Apple Silicon version and it makes a huge difference as well. As more software gets specifically optimized for the silicon, it's just going to get more powerful. I think you could get an M1 with 16GB memory and use that thing for the next 5 years with no issues. The CPUs are just so powerful. I don't have any plans in getting an M2 because the benefit is just not there for the money in my opinion.

I think you got carried away a bit there. Depending on the interface there will be drivers. The new thing will be these becoming user space drivers, rather than kernel ditto. This might be serious problem for those that won't be getting new ones for older hardware, even as the current ones are compatible with the M1/M2. Hopefully these are few.
For many, yes, me included. You can overload an M1 though.

I think the M2 is a really wrong decicion from Apple.

Much higher power consumption, hence more noisy macbooks again.

Who does care about 18% performance when it means more moving out of the low heat zone again?

I thought the finally got the idea that macbooks needs to be cool an almost silent even under heavy load, like the M1 now.

I've seen a few people say this, and although I believe it, I'm curious what type of work flow overloads it?

Logically, M1 is/was the fastest mac processor ever (until the M2 recently). What plugin maker is making a plugin that even the fastest processor available can't handle? Or is it chains of plugins that overload it or non-native code? Seems counter intuitive that someone would sell a plugin that even the fastest processer could not handle. I'm not trying to start an argument, but am genuinely curious what type of work loads the M1 can't handle.

I can kill it pretty quickly with Pigments and Amplitube. I think there are some others as well but I struggle to remember. I could definitely use a good bit more single core speed and quite a few more cores than my basic M1 mini.

I also use a ton of I/O and I suspect that doesn’t help.

This isn't my experience at all and I have run some very big sessions all day long, the M2 Air has not got hot at all, most the time it's hardly even warm, and of course totally silent, and consistently very powerful, the M2 is absolutely the right direction from Apple, the M2 Air is a stunning laptop, and is exceeding my expectations, how you could say its the wrong decision I really don't know

I was using a (what I thought was a powerful) Mac Pro before this, the M2 Air's single core performance is one of the things that shocked me the most, I would say two and a half to three times more juice and even when it does hit the top I get no crackling even at a very low buffer setting.

Is that really a single core speed issue though and not something that would be remedied by more cores? Sounds like a lot of processes on each core if it’s a big session. I can run amplitube and pigments on my 2016 MacBook Pro with a single core geek bench score of 764. M1 scores around 1750. https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

I can definitely choke the 2016 MBP, but it usually involves having a lot of tracks going at once. I don’t think I’ve ever had a single plugin it couldn’t handle in isolation. I would assume the M1 would be a lot more powerful, but it seems weird that it can’t handle some plugins.

I don't say M2 is terrible, but the M1 had the perfect heat/performance ratio, the M2 does throttle, runs very hot under stress. Macbook pros starts to struggle again too slightly.

https://youtu.be/15V44ovoUWE?t=464

M2 is using more power to impress in benchmarks. It's sad that Apple increased the power limit just for this while suffering in the noise and heat, throttling department.

I prefer the constant and cooler temperature from the M1 models while still being in the same performance range (I don't care whether it's about 15% faster in benchmarks, and in logic it is only some %, anything below 40% is not that noticeable imho)

Well my M2 Air has been under a lot of stress and it hasn't got hot and I haven't notice any throttling at all so my first hand experience contradicts what your saying, I have been using this for a whole month and it's solid as a rock, it's way faster than the Mac Pro so what's not to like? frankly if you don't like the M2 for some reason then don't get one and get the M1 instead, what's the problem?

Be happy with the M2.

I'm happy with my M1 pro and I would not want to buy an M2 currently. But when my Macbook breaks I have to. I'm afraid we might going to see more noise and heat again and I fear that the M.x future might not be so bright, with noisy and or very warm macbooks again. That's the problem.

I thought these times are finally over with the M1. M2 shows that Apple might going backwards just for some % performance. Messurments and reviews clearly shows that M2 is operating on the very upper limit in terms of thermical capacities for no good reason. That sucks. Not more and not less.

I think any conclusions about the M2 vs the M1 need to be on between similar models. The 14/16inch MacBook Pros will handle heat better than the M2 Air, both because of the form factor and because of the additional fan. Of course only time will tell to what extent, but that video says more about the new Air's thermal performance than the M2 chip's.

I really don't need to be told to be happy with the M2 I am happy, you on the other hand seem to want to be as negative as you can be and fear that Apple is getting it all wrong, well count me out of that thinking, I am very happy with the M2 it's doing everything I needed it to do faster than anything I have used for music before and so far hasn't got hot or had any noticeable throttling, so how terrible is that!

The M2 Pros have also higher thermal load. It's not Air vs. Pro.

My rant it just about Apple moving to a higher power limit (more heat, noise) with the same thermal system once again just to have some % more in benchmarks.

The M2 is basically a overclocked M1. Could be solved by Apple allowing us to set a smaller power limit, but that's not going to happen unfortunately.

In 2022 no or very low noise and low heat are much more important to me than a bit of performance.

Do your sessions often peg all of the cpu cores?

You might find in practise it's irrelevant. Also don't forget the M1 throttled as well.

Yeah right! I would love to decrease the power of the M2 down to the same as the M1 because we don't want all that extra CPU do we! and it might get hot, oh but one problem with that claim, My M2 isn't getting hot and I haven't noticed any throttling so what on earth are you going on about, again, it isn't getting hot and I haven't noticed any throttling, maybe the real world facts don't matter to you though, I have been working with very CPU instruments all morning and it's hardly even noticeably warm, I'm writing this post on it with logic running in the background, there is absolutely no issue here.

Not up to date with the rumors...are there any that says M2 14/16 Macbook Pros coming out before winter? I'm itching for the Macstudio, but would like the portability of a new laptop. I just hope it isn't just an M2 update that they do, but that they up the ram to 128 as well. Wouldn't mind the dual-cpu that they put in the Ultra either (I'd gladly deal with whatever extra heat it'll put out....maybe just put it on top of one of those laptop stands with a fan)

Go to Settings-Battery and check the low power mode box.

At lease you realize it's a rant,

Regarding "thermal load" and "moving to higher power limits", higher clocked chips with more transistors generate more heat, that is not unique to Apple silicon. What matters is how that heat is managed so the computer can keep running.

Right now there are two M2 laptop models: the fanless Air and the ancient 13inch Pro. They imply little about how effective the 14/16inch MacBook Pros will be at cooling the M2 while maintaining performance.

It's absolute nonsense that the M2 is only outperforming in benchmarks. M2s perform significantly better than M1s in many real world scenarios while in some situations they perform only somewhat better.

Allegedly they'll be updating the 14+16 with M2 some point in Oct or Nov.

I would guess we're looking at 48gb on the pro and 96gb ram on the max.

;-) Yes I do.

I think the current silent and cool operating models are such a blessing, even more impressive than the performance and I never want to go back to hearing fan noise or having to touch hot cases again. In my book the M1 have the perfect power limit for the case design.

Apple have a record of pushing things over the thermal limit. Was it the 2018 or 2019 intel that was thinner and overheating all the time? It's clearly not the case with the M2, but seeing that the power limit was increased in the reminds me of that dark time.

Not wanting to compare the M2 with that, but I hope you understand the deep fear that made me rant.