Seeking advice between M2 Pro and M2 Max

outbackyonder

Good morning!

I am in the market to upgrade my very old 2013 16" MacBook Pro.

Looking at the specs for the 16" M2 Pro v M2 Max I was leaning towards the 12-Core CPU, 38-Core GPU 32GB Unified Memory, 1TB SSD but before I commit I just want to seek everyone's thoughts on whether this is excessive for my needs.

I do some occasional image editing and will probably go ahead and buy adobe Lightroom but an area I am pretty keen on is video editing since purchasing the Mavic 3 Pro earlier this year.

It wont be for commercial purposes but I do want to get the most out of the video captured from the Mavic which is why I was thinking of the M2 Max but from what I am reading it appears this model is more aimed at commercial type editors, designers and intensive programming, etc.

So for a fairly big saving am I better off going with the M2 Pro 12-Core CPU, 19-Core GPU, 16GB Unified Memory, 1TB SSD Storage¹

any thoughts? Advice? 

TIA!

tht

If you are money limited, I would get an M2 Pro with 32 GB RAM and 2 TB storage over a M2 Max with 16 GB RAM and 1 TB storage.

If you plan on keeping the machine tor 10 years, prioritize RAM, then storage, and last would be compute performance. The RAM will be hugely important 5 years down the road, much more so the GPU and video ASICs.

Priorities change if you buy-sell/tradein every 3 years.

outbackyonder

Thank you very much.  Great advice.

Yep I would be aiming to have it for long term so this makes very good sense.

Many thanks for taking the time to reply.

spheric

You're not in a market where even minutes off rendering a file translates into literal dollars saved, so I'd recommend: 

M2 Pro 12-core, 32 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD (video eats up A LOT of storage). 

That should last you a good while.