I decided to upgrade my laptop. Instead of selecting the base model, or even one that has slightly better specs, I decided to buy a 2023 MacBook Pro with the following options in addition to the amazing display, battery life, and ports that are standard equipment:
Apple M2 Max chip
- 12-core CPU with 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
- 30-core GPU
- 16-core Neural Engine
- 400GB/s memory bandwidth
Media engine
- Hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW
- Video decode engine
- Two video encode engines
- Two ProRes encode and decode engines
32GB unified memory
1TB SSD
The speakers on this laptop are even incredible.
I am replacing a 2017 MacBook Pro with the following options:
- 3.1GHz dual-core Intel Core i5
- 512GB PCIe-based onboard SSD
- 8GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory
- Touch Bar with integrated Touch ID sensor
To get a sense of the performance difference between these machines, watch Luke Miani’s video comparing a 2017 MacBook Pro with better specs than mine and a MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro chip.
What do I do with all the power this machine offers?
- Edit our church’s weekly Sunday service into 2 separate, shorter videos using Final Cut Pro to be published onto YouTube (Children’s Message video and Sermon video)
- Export the audio from the sermon to produce and upload a podcast
- (Coming Soon) Use Parallels to create a Windows 11 virtual machine in order to use the one Windows program needed for the small business I help run. Parallels is now installed and Windows 11 for ARM seems to be working like a champ, but the program I need (Procare) is not compatible with the ARM architecture quite yet.
- I also maintain websites, produce newsletters, create marketing and social media materials, and a variety of other work on this machine for church, the small business, and my own hobby interests.
Although I may not be a professional content creator where every minute saved could result in faster publishing and more paid views, or faster finished products and more client work, (many, many) minutes saved does result in less time at the keyboard and more time spent with my wife and family. And that payoff makes the investment in this new laptop well worth the cost of replacing that comparatively slow 2017 model.