fast computer and average monitor vs cheaper computer and good monitor

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BrendanR

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About to replace my old slow intel macbook with either a m2 max or a m3 max. If get the m2 max will have more money to spend on a monitor and can get an eizo cs2740 with Hardware calibration or something in that price range or if get the newer m3 max will have to get a cheaper monitor like the Asus pa279crv (or within that price range) that is only software calibration. I work with large numbers of photos and often large panoramas and use lightroom, photoshop and DXO pureraw as well as video editing in da vinchi resolve, Have also been selling a fair few prints lately. which would you pick? Thanks
 
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BrendanR said:
About to replace my old slow intel macbook with either a m2 max or a m3 max. If get the m2 max will have more money to spend on a monitor and can get an eizo cs2740 with Hardware calibration or something in that price range or if get the newer m3 max will have to get a cheaper monitor like the Asus pa279crv (or within that price range) that is only software calibration. I work with large numbers of photos and often large panoramas and use lightroom, photoshop and DXO pureraw as well as video editing in da vinchi resolve, Have also been selling a fair few prints lately. which would you pick? Thanks
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The m2 max is a very fast computer. While The m3 max is faster, I don’t think you will be giving up much with an m2 max . If your planning on getting a mac book pro version they will be in short supply.
 
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Agree. I have the eizo cs2740, and it is great, including for soft proofing prints. My relatively new Lenovo mini windows computer with 32mg DRAM works well except its integrated graphics are very slow for Lrc denoise. The M2 should be faster.
 
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Thanks for the replys, yeah yoou guys are probably right and there is some good m2 max options in the refurb store at the moment so might jump on one of them then get the Eizo
 
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Something to think about is a current MacBook Pro has very high resolution per square inch for its screen size, and a separate larger second monitor with similar resolution per square inch is far from inexpensive.
 
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Apple released the M3 to encourage people to sell their current computers and buy new ones. It is how Apple generates sales and profits. As to how much time it will save a photographer working with still images, that is trivial in the overall scheme of things.

I find access to my working files to be the key bottleneck and not the CPU or the GPU of the computer. With my network the main bottleneck is a switch that limits data I/O to less than 1GB speeds (ignoring the considerable overhead cost of sending Ethernet packets through a NAS output port and then through a switch and then through the Ethernet port of a computer. That is why I use a RAID1 mirror array that is inside my workstation to avoid these performance problems.

When I had an 8086 computer and was using a compiler for an application it would take 60 minutes to finish. When I replace that computer with a 286 CPU one the compile time was reduced to 30 minutes. When I replaced that computer with 386 CPU powered one the compile time was reduced to 1 minute. I viewed any gains after that as inconsequential. The same holds true for processing still image files.

With my wedding photography I would be processing about 3,000 files after an event and using Photoshop actions to make a first pass on the files. It took about an hour to finish. I upgrade from a Windows computer to one using the modern Mac OSX and the time required was reduced by half. But I was seldom waiting for it to finish and would have the processing running while I was doing other things.

With the exception of processing large video files I see little difference today. The data I/O and the GPU play the greater role if the computer has enough Ram installed. The lines are blurred with CPUs that combine the central processor with onboard graphics processing and onboard VRAM. Even with video one is working with a proxy and then applying the edits to the video which do not require the attention of the individual while this is being done. The videographer can be "offline" while this is taking place.

What I find interesting is that for the price of the Apple Studio of more than $4,000 one can instead by a renewed Mac Pro workstation directly from Apple. Apple provides great value with its laptops but not with its desktop computers or its workstations.
 
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Even the original M1 nothing ran circles around my 2019 iMac and 2015 MBP. I got the M1 Pro MBP 14 and it’s fine. The M2 and M3 are ’faster’ but for most people the extra speed doesn’t amount to much. For a pro making money with it…yeah, but the fastest one you can afford. For amateurs…just get the Pro version of whatever M chip you get and you’ll be fine.
 
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A good monitor should last you through several computer's lives. It is your window into your images, so I would always want as good of a display as makes sense to the rest of my equipment.

--Ken
 
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Anjin San said:
Even the original M1 nothing ran circles around my 2019 iMac and 2015 MBP. I got the M1 Pro MBP 14 and it’s fine. The M2 and M3 are ’faster’ but for most people the extra speed doesn’t amount to much. For a pro making money with it…yeah, but the fastest one you can afford. For amateurs…just get the Pro version of whatever M chip you get and you’ll be fine.
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I second that. I bought the 14 inch MacBook Pro last year with the M1 chip and it’s way faster than my 2020 Intel iMac.
 
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Rixpx said:
I second that. I bought the 14 inch MacBook Pro last year with the M1 chip and it’s way faster than my 2020 Intel iMac.
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And I'm sure that the M3 version of the 14 MBP is faster than the M1 Pro version…but I'm retired and an extra 3-5 seconds on each pano merge or lens blur application or denoise processing time isn't worth replacing a 2 year old computer. My last laptop (2015 rMBP) lasted me 6+ years before getting upgraded.
 
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