Should I update my Mac Studio m1 to an M4 machine? I don't need but from consulting with others, it seems to be much faster and I can get a decent trade in on current machine.
Mac Studio, macOS 15.3
The question I always ask is, "in what ways does your current machine fall short of your expectations/desires?"
if none, save your money -- for an even bigger jump later.
if you want more bragging rights, that may be on your list of more desires.
I traded in my Mac Studio M1 for a Mac Mini M4 pro. Performance on both were about the same but the Mini had a smaller footprint and had TB5 ports that I wanted to test. There was no other reason I had to make that trade.
You're probably not going to notice much difference in performance unless you are running very CPU-intensive or GPU-intensive stuff. (X-Plane with settings cranked up?!?)
MacTracker shows Geekbench scores for the M1 Max Mac Studio as 2407 / 12479 (10 CPU cores).
For a 14" M4 Max MacBook Pro they are 3830 / 22671 (14 CPU cores) and 3806 / 25678 (16 CPU cores).
If you were waiting on a long CPU-bound batch job that made good use of all CPU cores, the M4 Max Mac Studio might finish the job in about half the time a M1 Max Mac Studio would take. If you frequently had to run such jobs, as part of a professional workflow, that might be good reason to upgrade. But for a lot of interactive work, the M1 Max Mac Studio runs so fast that the CPU is going to be waiting on you.
Apple Silicon Macs are way too fast. Make the "jump" later. When your Mac Studio M1 stops from being supported by the newest version of MacOS, make the change that time.
update my Mac Studio m1?
