I have got to retire my 2015 iMac which has been serving me well for the last ten years and I am happy to spend the $5,000 it takes to get the best possible MacBook and monitor IF Sketchup 24 will run on the new M4 chip and the latest Apple OS.
Has anyone done it yet?
I am thinking I might just buy a M4 Mac mini with 10/10 Cores and 16 G Ram to see what happens when I load it but curious if anyone has any experience with this yet.
If not I will probably wait until next Spring when SU 25 releases and hopefully has caught up with Apple.
Am I nuts not to just buy a PC and go that route, Ive been an apple user since day one (1980’s) and only used windows at a job for a few years and hated it.
I just retired my 2014 MacBook Pro 15 and my 2019 iMac - moved to Apple Studio M2 Max and the Studio Display and have an M3 MacBook Air that I really like for email / presentations / etc. - I have SketchUp on it but I don’t need it for remote work. I’m on Sonoma through, I’ll wait for SketchUp to catch up before moving to Sequoia.
Very happy with the performance change from the old Intel Macs.
The M4 would be a huge step up for you I’m sure. It’s seems SKP is running under Sequoia for some folks but I haven’t read about the new M4s and SKP.
I’m on a mini M1 with 16Gb and at times it already clogs up very quickly. and considering this machine will be competitive for the next 5 years (at least, my M1 still is fine after 4) you want to plan ahead.
other than that, haven’t seen anything about M4 and sketchup yet. @colin has anyone gotten their hands on one in boulder ?
Yes, Apple Silicon M-series it a giant leap forward, go for it. For the best performance from SketchUp / Layout get as much ram as you can afford, I would certainly consider an “older” M2 / M3 max or ultra, studio or MBP w/ 64gb compared to a low ram M4. I have also heard some anecdotal reports of thermal issues on the new M4 mini under heavy load, worth looking into.
yep
CPU / GPU is like the engine of a car.
RAM is like the petrol tank.
having a car that can go 300+ km/h is nice, but if you have to fill the tank every 30 min it’s not great. Better have a 200km/h car that you can drive full speed for 2h.
I upgraded recently to apple silicon— I don’t regret it, but there have been some sketchup issues. There are some anti-aliasing problems, where the mouse doesn’t match the current tool— you can fix this by clicking out of the sketchup window to another app and then clicking back in. In general, what my research suggested was that the cores, and more of them, don’t help sketchup, because it can only run on one core at a time since its computation is linear. It can’t divide up the tasks between different cores. It all has to be done in order, sequentially. That said, the multiple cores are helpful in that you can not worry at all about having multiple apps running while sketchup is open, so while it’s figuring something out, you can be working in another window with no diminution in speed or higher crash potential. Obviously more memory helps.
True, but not new or limited to Apple Silicon. SketchUp’s usage of a single core does not depend on the CPU architecture, and if more cores are available you could always use them to run other apps simultaneously.
For the antialiasing difference, there is a problem on Apple Silicon machines where you can’t have both use fast feedback, and an antialiasing setting higher than 0x. Turning off use fast feedback will let you choose higher settings.
Or, use SketchUp 2024. The new graphics engine allows use fast feedback and higher antialiasing settings.
Unrelated to my day time job, I had a reason to order an M4 Mac mini. Should get it tomorrow, then I can be more sure whether it has any differences compared to M3.
I was hanging out for the new M4 Mac mini as an upgrade from the M1 that I bought early on to see how it would run and never looked back. (with just 8GB RAM - It coped pretty well, but recently I was starting to frequently max out the RAM with layout and a few other apps running.) I hadn’t really considered the compatibility with Sequoia until the last minute, but jumped in anyway, and everything seems fine. Still a number of crashes that I’m pretty sure are plugin related, but the M4 Pro with 24 GB is such a great upgrade, and I’ve really been enjoying it. That said, I have been surprised to notice high memory pressure at times, but given I was getting by with 8GB, I think I am happy to close a few windows rather than suggest 24GB isn’t enough.
Normally I get the most maxed out configuration I can. For example, my MacBook Pro is 64 GB, 2TB SSD, M3 Max. I tried a copying speed test, with SketchUp 2022. My shiny new M4, 24GB, 512GB SSD (it’s the M4 Pro with less cores) copied the 2.1GB of files about a second faster than the M3 Max.
I tried a spin test in 2022 and 2024, on M4 and M3. This was with a 900,000 polygon model, to make it be more demanding. In each case Profiles was turned on.
With 2022 the M3 came out at about 8.6 fps, M4 was 7.5 fps. With 2024, and the new graphics engine, the M3 was 59 fps, M4 was 129 fps. Now, the M4 was connected to a 4K monitor with HDMI, it is possible that the M3 was limited to 60 fps for the internal screen.
As the Mini doesn’t have an internal screen, hopefully other external monitors will work fast as well.
It sounds like I should be able to proceed with my upgrading but I think I’ll get top of the line / best specs MacBook Pro and just plan on using it for another ten years like I did my iMac.
When you think about how amazing bt SketchUp and the computers we run it all on $5,000 every five to ten years really is a great value considering I use it to make my living.
