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I watch ArtIsRight’s videos and he does a great job. I’ve seen his panorama tests across several generations of Macs, I do panoramas myself, and I think some clarification would help here.
By @Mystical_Hummingbird5838I saw a youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2W6Hx5mxWs comparing MBP M3 vs M4 pro vs M4 Max. He says that the pano module uses mostly ram rather then CPU or GPU to render. And in his tests, only the M3 could complete the renders without crashing. He talks about this bug about 10 minutes into the video.
About resources: No, he doesn’t say it “uses mostly RAM.” His test slide says “CPU & RAM Base(d) Task” so he acknowledges that panorama merge performance is based on both CPU & RAM. What’s also implied there is that the GPU doesn’t make much difference. When he talks about RAM, he means that RAM makes more of a difference with panorama merge simply because it’s one of the few times in Lightroom Classic where multiple images need to be processed as a unit, so the more RAM available, the easier it is to hold more frames in RAM at once to merge them.
When I watch macOS Activity Monitor during a merge, what I see is consistent with what Art says: Multiple CPU cores engage, and that means multiple performance cores; at the same time the GPU is not very busy.
About the bug he’s talking about: It is not that “only the M3 could complete the renders without crashing,” it is that of all the Apple Silicon Macs he had with 16GB unified memory (RAM), only the M3 didn’t crash. Acknowledging the 16GB is important, because I think that’s what be means about the bug: It affects only low memory Apple Silicon Macs. I’m confident that his test set of fourteen 36-megapixel Nikon images would successfully merge on any Mac with more memory. I bring this up because you are not going to (and should not) buy a 16GB Mac to merge panoramas, none of your proposed configurations are that low. So, you’re unlikely to see that bug. (I have 32GB and that’s worked great merging panoramas on my M1 Pro for three years.)
I think the way this is going to work out for your next Mac is:
Forget about the MacBook Air. It has several major disadvantages for frequent panorama merging. It has the fewest CPU cores and the least amount of unified memory, so out of your proposed configurations the M3 Air will certainly be the slowest at merging panoramas. Another disadvantage is if you plan to bulk process panorama/HDR merges, because not only does it have fewer CPU cores and less memory to do the bulk processing, it has no fan…so after a few minutes, when the high CPU usage of bulk merge processing causes the Air to hit its maximum temperature, the only way it will be able to lower internal temperature is to slow down the processing speed. The Air might be OK if you only process smaller panoramas occasionally so that heat doesn’t build up.
Also, the displays are important: You might think you prefer the 15" size of the Air display (2880 x 1864 px), but keep in mind that the 14" MacBook Pro display (3024 x 1964 px) actually has more pixels for more real working area. And, if you are not only doing HDR merges but you also want to work with the HDR edit mode enabled in the Develop module, then you have to get the MacBook Pro because its XDR display meets the 1000-nit sustained luminance that Adobe recommends for HDR editing; that requirement is not met by the MacBook Air display (500 nits max).
Because of those Air limitations, the M4 MacBook Pros you proposed are a much better option for panoramas and using the HDR edit mode. They have about twice the CPU cores as the Air, and two cooling fans so that high performance over time isn’t compromised by heat, and a lot more memory. And, as Steve Jobs would have said…there is one more thing. The M4 CPU has high single-core performance compared to other Mac and PC CPUs including the M3, so just on single-core CPU performance alone the M4 will process panoramas faster than the M3.
What about the 16" M4 Max vs Pro? The M4 Max has a few more CPU cores for a slight multi-core speed advantage over the M4 Pro. The Max has a vastly more powerful GPU and the memory to keep it fed, but unfortunately Lightroom Classic panorama merging doesn’t use the GPU much so the cost of the upgraded GPU doesn’t help here. What makes the M4 Max so much faster in the ArtIsRight panorama test is the slightly faster CPU plus double the unified memory. The Max costs so much more that you need to decide whether the Pro is going to be fast enough for your budget, or if your panorama merging volume is high enough that you have to budget for the Max.
Because you’re currently using Intel-based computers, either of your proposed MacBook Pro systems (and maybe even the M3 Air) should seem much faster at panorama merging than what you have now. I just tested my biggest rectangular panorama (53 images, 16 megapixels each). My old 16GB MacBook Pro with an 8th gen Intel Core i5 merges that in 41 minutes, my 32GB base M1 Pro takes 14 minutes, and either of your proposed M4 MacBook Pro options would probably beat that M1 Pro by a lot, according to Art’s tests.
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