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Planning new macbook - what do I need.

Tony Collins

Nightmare. New macbook pro planned. But what processor do I need. How much Ram (more the merrier of course but how much real world perforemance difference will I see)


M2, as a minimum, but do I need the M2 pro?

Does anyone know if the Neural engine is used by ON1 for the AI functions?

Ideally I'd go into a mac store, download the demo onto a couple of macs and benchmark some of the features. But as far as I can tell Mac stores don't let you do that.

Are there any M2 mac owners whod be prepared to time some operations (or even better put up a screen recording on youtube?

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Comments

7 comments

Date Votes
  • Martin de Jong

    To be future proof i’d choose more 16gb memory and a 1tb hard drive plus an external ssd for you pictures. I don’t think you need a pro.

    You might take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGBdh-bXyJc. 

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    I agree with everything Martin said. I would add that no, the neural engine is not used my Photo RAW’s AI. It is used to train new AI engines not for applying AI that has already been created.

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  • Tony Collins

    According to this article it can be used for both. Though I'm not surprised app developers have not yet worked out how to use it.

    https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-transformers

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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    You'll have to ask tech support to ask the engineers then. My understanding it the ANE is used for training new machine learning models.

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  • Tony Collins
    Thanks for all your replies folks
    Apple is hacking me off with the cost of the 16 to 32GB ram upgrade. They are driving me to look at windows laptops - which I never thought I'd do.
     
    AMD have just announced a new laptop CPU they are self describing as an apple silicon killer. I'm gonna wait and see how laptops based on this perform.
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  • Brian Lawson Community moderator

    It's been my experience that any Windows laptop you choose will not have as long a life as a Macintosh. Macs do cost more up front but they last so much longer that the ROI is much better for them. I've run my Macs for 10 years or more. I've never gotten that much life from a Widows system.

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  • Tony Collins

    Oh, I agree - posting this from my 10yo Macbook air - which is still perfectly usable for all standard "office", browsing, streaming (music and video) applications. Just not up to modern AI and video editing applications.

    And more recently, looking around at high performance windows machines, they seem to be priced similar to macs for equivalent performance.

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