Hi - has anybody tried any of the new M2’s yet - either MacBook Air or Pro?
My daughter could do with a new laptop for school and I thought I’d give her my MacBook Air, 2020 M1, if the M2 was a noticeable performance upgrade for me to buy for myself.
I don’t work on anything too intense or heavy with Sketchup so far, but that’s because in my day job I work in AutoCAD on Windows for an architecture practice. However, I’m looking to freelance with Sketchup and Enscape, after being a casual/hobbyist user of those in my own spare time. I’ll be mainly just drawing one off residences at a time and occasionally AutoCAD LT for Mac when required. I’m fairly new to rendering and have been playing with Enscape on my M1, with no performance problems so far.
Very curious about that too… I’m running it already on Mac Studio M1 max, it’s very fast on this. I’m rendering with Podium, which is also amazingly fast on the Studio M1 max. I would like to have a second machine just for rendering, considering the Macbook Air M2. But as far as I can see M2 is not mentioned in the Trimble hardware advice, only the M1 is.
You’ll be fine, they are both the same architecture of chip.
Apple branded a commonly used type of Chip architeciture (ARM) as M1.
Programs have to be built for ARM on Mac rather than X64, which was the architecure they used before.
Prorgrams had to be rebuilt and rewired in order to work with this instruction set and alongside this the proprietory GPU that is inside of it.
For most software, once that has been done, programs should work fine moving forwards - unless Apple change other things in the OS.
Right now they have
M1
M1 Max
M1 Ultra
And moving fowards they will have
M2
M2 Max
M2 Ultra
So if you are buying a newer machine, each tier will be a little more powerful than the tier from the generation before.
Thanks for the replies input , all. Just to summarise, I’ve specced two configuration for around my budget. An M2 13" and an M1 Pro 14" - I’m not worried about screen size as will be using a secondary display, mostly.
Is it obvious that the M1 Pro will be the better general all-round performer out of the two?
Selamlar, şu an kullanmakta olduğum sistem bir masaüstü PC, donanım özellikleri şunlar;
AMD ryzen 9 5900x cpu
32 GB ram
Quadro rtx 4000 gpu
Daha önce hiç Mac bilgisayarda sketchup denemedim, şu an sketchup pro 2022 kullanıyorum, merak ettiğim şey M2 işlemci ve gömülü gpu nun verimi, hiç render almıyorum, ancak çizim olarak yoğun ve ağır projeler olarak çalışıyorum, sorum şu ; anlık çizimde , kaydetme ve açılış esnasında, donma kasılma ve ya yukarıdaki kullandığım sistem özelliklerine göre M2 işlemcili 16 GB ram li Mac mini veya Mac Pro bilgisayar daha mı hızlıdır, kendi sistemim daha mı iyi?
Hey Stevie, mind sharing your experience after using it for almost 1 year? I’ve been working on a Lenovo Legion (11th gen i7, RTX3060, 64gb ramm). Although the performance is outstanding, the weight & battery life are becoming an issue as I travel a lot lately. I have been looking for a lightweight substitute and the MB Air M2 / MB Pro is at the top of my list.
I model mainly on SketchUp and render using Enscape & Lumion.
Enscape is- but note it runs and looks worse than on the Mac version., as Enscape uses a bunch of NVidia’s R&D and Apple doesn’t support nvidia.
As something a little more Mac-like in form, but maintaining hardware/software function, perhaps take a look at the new surface laptop 2, which was announced last week.
It’s hard to beat a mac for weight and battery life tho, but the compromise comes in 3D performance.
As something a bit less Mac-like than the Surface laptop, the Asus Zenbook line, if they still carry Nvidia graphics, could be worth a look, too. As my carry-around I have an older 13" model that has mobile Nvidia graphics and runs my models (they are small) quite well.
I have an M1 Max MacBook Pro, it’s an incredible machine I also have a desktop pc and the performance is the same the pc has an i7 13700K and a 4070ti, I don’t use the mac to render but I’ve used it to try enscape and the performance is like on my pc, it’s true that enscape has some features that use Nvidia on pc but on mac it uses the apple gpu, integrated gpu’s on M series SOCs are a lot more powerful than X86 igpus. Recently apple presented their new soc for the iPhone 15 pro, it’s the first soc that has a gpu with ray tracing hardware acceleration, the chips for macs are like the ones on the phones but upscaled, more cores and higher clock speeds, I would wait until they release the M3 to have a Mac with a gpu a lot more powerful.
