Hello, I’m planning to buy a MacBook Pro and I’m trying to decide between the following two specifications. Both models have 1TB storage. Which one would be a better choice for operating SketchUp? If there’s another option/other specifications I should consider, I’m open to suggestions as well. I am an interior designer and I work with heavy models. I have been using an old intel MacBook Pro which I need to upgrade. Many thanks!
Option 1:
Chip
Apple M2 Max chip
12-core CPU with 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
38-core GPU
16-core Neural Engine
400GB/s memory bandwidth
Memory
32GB unified memory
Option 2:
Chip
Apple M3 Max chip
14-core CPU with 10 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores
30-core GPU
16-core Neural Engine
300GB/s memory bandwidth
Memory
36GB unified memory
Both are excellent machines, a few things to note:
There have been some reported conflicts with the M3 and SketchUp24, a few specific crashes and bugs that appear to be only showing up on the M3. This is likely to get improved on with future releases but it’s currently a problem for some people.
SketchUP (like all CAD software) is a singel thread operation, so the number of cores has little to no bearing on SketchUP performance. It might help your computer cope with other programs and operations running simultaneously, but SketchUp will always only use one core. Processor clock speed, hard disk write speed (get solid state flash drive), and RAM are bigger factors. If possible get the most ram you can as it’s not upgradeable in the MacBook, 32 is the good, 64 is better.
If price is no object then it does not matter much, but all things being equal you can likely get equal or at least unnoticeably different performance from a slightly older chip at a big savings. I would be looking at an M2 with 64mb RAM.
Yes - as much RAM as possible, as big a hard drive as you can afford! I made the mistake with my M1 of “only” getting 1 TB (don’t know what happened there). Other than that - my M1 is still a freakin’ beast, so M2 and M3 are both excellent choices. If money is an objective, then go for M2 and pimp up the other two factors (RAM and disk space)