When I went to get my mac studio several people on this forum advised me the base models work fine with mac silicone chips. I followed their advice and got my mac studio for about 2k. That proved to be a wise choice.
Apple M3
- Thread starter sh1209
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Yeah I think I’ve learned my lesson with not going overboard with specs.
ajrmd
Well-known member
Well, when they pushed the M1's they claimed that because of the advanced memory utilization that buying more memory was not necessary. I landed on a 14" MBP with the M1 along with 16GB and it really wasn't sufficient. Better than the Intel versions to be sure, though here it is just a couple of years later and it is dated. I'm trying to hold out until the M4's.
I bought the same machine and am using to type this. I haven't seen it struggle with anything yet but I agree my next upgrade will go a little more on RAM and a little bigger hard drive.
I have written here about my choice to select an M3 Max MacBook Pro with "only" 36 Gb RAM and the base "System On Chip" for that model. Now a few months later, I'm still enjoying the speed it offers compared with my previous MacBook Pro with an Intel chip set. I have not yet done any video.
abc123brian
Well-known member
As an FYI for others buying a Mac. In some cases the base model is a great bargain, other times you need to add a few upgrades to get a big bump in performance. For example with the M1 iMac, the base model had a single fan and less ports but if you upgraded to the second tier model, you got dual fans and extra ports. The single fan model was louder and thermal throttled quickly where the second tier was quieter and didn't thermal throttle. Another example is the 14" MacBook Pro with Max chip may thermal throttle slowing it to the Pro chip performance so the expensive upgrade might not be worthwhile. For most people, it doesn't pay to max out the specs.