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Also, don't forget, a laptop will always throttle down nominal component speeds to avoid overheating. There's no way to get adequate cooling on a laptop.
By @D Fosse
I think this conventional advice needs to be reconsidered in light of the fact that they are using an Apple Silicon MacBook Pro.
The 14"/16" MacBook Pro laptops have two things: Apple Silicon SoCs with excellent performance per watt (high performance with low, battery-friendly power consumption), and excellent cooling. I use a much earlier and less powerful M1 Pro MacBook Pro, and it is also my desktop computer (connected to displays and storage through a hub), because the power usage is so low that when using Creative Cloud apps, it rarely gets hot enough to make the fans audible. It is quieter than any desktop computer I have ever used.
To make a 14"/16" MacBook Pro hot enough to throttle, you really have to max out the CPU/GPU for an extended period of time, as you might during intensive rendering of video or 3D. The short bursts of CPU/GPU usage in photo editing apps are usually not enough to cause thermal throttling on Apple Silicon hardware. If you canāt hear the fans, then it has not even reached the point where itās thermal throttling.
If their M3 Max is running slow, it is not due to any normally expected thermal problem. It has to do with something else, like how efficient Photoshop is at handling very large files.
Saving is unfortunately one of the things that a new computer is not going to help with much. Saving is not fully multithreaded, so it might never be able to take full advantage of all the CPU cores and SSD speed in an M3 Max, or a PC. If the main problem is that saving large files is slow, consider selecting Disable Compression of PSD and PSB Files, if you can live with the larger files. Also, some say saving large files is faster if you disable Save in Background.
The M3 Max is going to make the most difference with:
Fully multithreaded operations. Photoshop recently upgraded its compositing engine, which is why you see a new Multithreaded Compositing option in the Settings > Performance panel. But you might rarely see full use of the 14 M3 Max CPU cores in any application that edits still 2D images, because most of the time the pixels are just sitting there waiting for you to do something. The CPU cores in an M3 Max would be fully used for things like video editing and 3D graphics, where the computer needs to re-render many objects constantly, so those video frames or 3D objects can be distributed among the 14 cores.
Fully GPU-accelerated operations. Photoshop is increasing the number of features that are GPU-accelerated, but again, there is only so much you can do for a single still image document. One place where the extra GPU cores in the M3 Max can make a difference is AI processing, especially the AI Denoise feature in Adobe Camera Raw. The M3 Max is probably many times faster than the Intel Mac for those operations. But if youāre often just painting or moving sliders in Curves, extra GPU cores are not going to help all that much.
The M3 Max is a fantastic computer and I would always choose that over an old Intel Mac, but again, it really uses its full potential in video and 3D applications. For photo editing, higher single-core performance tends to help more than additional cores. An Apple Silicon M3 of any level does have much higher single-core performance than an Intel MacBook Pro, but the benefits are uneven depending on which part of the application it is, and saving documents is one of those things that may not be much faster on a newer computer. But at least you can try those settings.
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