New Macbook M2?

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.

TIA

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.

Thank you for your help Elmtec-Adam!
In that case I will without worries add an M2 to the team :slight_smile:

No problem

Just be aware that an M2 is still less powerful and an M1 Max - and keep those tiers in mind.

Got that! The M2 will give me back the 10 cores of the macStudio. I will only use it for rendering.

Less powerful in multi-threaded or graphics contexts, but the M2 is 15-20% faster in single-threaded tasks than the M1 (of any variety).

Interesting! That’s good to know.

Just looking at the benchmarks now

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?

If you do more GPU based stuff the M1 Pro will be the better allrounder.

If you need more CPU grunt, then the M2 will be better.

SketchUp always works better with more CPU - but either of those will be a big step up from what you use now, that is almost certain.

The GPU based tasks are typically going to be real time renderers or gaming.

Enscape will massively benefit from the better GPU.
If Enscape is a priority, then go for the M1 Pro

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Thanks Adam :+1:

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?

@steviewo, I’d imagine that the storage would be of concern? 512 GB isn’t that large to start…
Maybe invest in 1TB, and external HDs via thunderbolt?

Mate - this post is over 6 months old! I bought a MacBook Pro not long after posting!

Ha! my mistake. I have recently signed up to this forum. :grin:

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.

Lumion isn’t available for Mac.

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.

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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.

Ooh yes, they do some well specced models with beautiful OLED screens

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.

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