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rafel_lrm
rafel_lrm
Participant
July 23, 2023
Question

Planning to upgrade my MacBook

  • July 23, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 183 views

G'day,

 

I am planning to upgrade my old macbook pro to

MacBook Pro 14-inch
Apple M2 Pro with
12-Core CPU
19-Core GPU
16GB Unified Memory
1TB SSD Storage

 Can someone advise is this good enough for Photoshop, Lightroom and Illustrator? Thank you and greatly appreciated with any advise.

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Conrad_CCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 24, 2023

That should be pretty good. I have been running those applications on an 14" M1 Pro (the previous generation) with similar specs, and those applications run quickly and smoothly on it. Far more satisfying than any Intel Mac I ever used.

 

If your daily workloads are heavy, or you edit large images, or you like to keep multiple major applications open at the same time, you might consider 32GB of Unified Memory if you can afford it, especially if you want to use the computer for as long as possible. But 16GB will work fine for more things.

rafel_lrm
rafel_lrmAuthor
Participant
July 24, 2023

Thank you for your reply. I'm juggling between m2 max or m2 pro with 16gb unified ram, as I am planning to use sidecar on my iPad also. 

Conrad_C
Community Expert
Conrad_CCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 24, 2023

The Max version of M1/M2 might not help very much with Photoshop and Illustrator. The Max is most helpful with applications that can really use all the cores it offers. Two examples would be Lightroom Classic, but only when bulk processing or bulk exporting large shoots; or video editing. But because Photoshop and Illustrator are focused on editing single documents, they don’t really generate enough work to hand off to all the Max cores.

 

You can see some tests comparing the effects of more CPU/GPU vs more unified memory on the ArtIsRight channel on YouTube. He includes Lightroom Classic and Photoshop in his tests.

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