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Hi, am looking to buy 1 of the the new M1 Pro 14inch MacBooks.

Which configuration do you recommend to best run your applications?
(CPU, GPU, Ram)

I don't need video configurations which is why I am ignoring the Max variations (unless you recommend otherwise).

Many thanks for your help!

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I think it might help to know what your budget is

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It’s totally simple.

Pick the maximum spec device within your budget constraints.

As Apple devices are almost impossible to be upgraded (CPU, RAM, less GPU, ext. SDD) you should never purchase base spec models. These are an evil trap to catch Budget-restricted users into the Apple ecosystem, only to find out their are almost useless for professionals work. It’s good that you can sell them used for good value when you realize you need a beefier machine. RAM below 32 GB is kids toy (since 2018)

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Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

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I'd probably hang fire for MacBooks with M2 chips.

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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Affinity Help - Affinity Desktop Tutorials - Feedback - FAQ - most asked questions

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I already work on the M1 13inch. I maxed the ram to 16Gb and then noticed in the comparative reviews that there was very little benefit over 8Gb unless you were running the SOC at full tilt for 15 minutes or so. I'm guessing that some of the Max upgrades are likely to fall into the same category where the type of work that I do is concerned (vector heavy and photo editing).

Can't see the point in overspending if there's no benefit. I have no budget constraint really – just a fondness for common sense...

I would love to get a tech insight from Affinity itself!

 

Cheers guys.

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I bought heavily into Ryzen and have a Ryzen PC, Ryzen Laptop and a Ryzen Server. But I am also a long time Mac User and love Apple Silicon and have M1 powered iPad Pro, Mac Mini and the MacBook Air.

The M1 MacBook Air is the best laptop I have ever owned. Just the base configuration, 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB SSD, and it has one less GPU core, got it for $800. A definite steal at that price point and it is amazing how it punches above its weight. No fan, stays cool even when I stress it, battery life is insane.

I think one thing people need to reassess is specs and what is truly needed. I have 32 GB in my Ryzen PC, 3200 DDR4 RAM but the memory bandwidth and speeds are really pokey compared to my MacBook Air. This unified memory that Apple is pushing, there may be some truth that 8 GB may be equivalent to 16 GB in Windows, that 16 GB might be closer to 32 GB in Windows. The M1, is using 128 bit memory bandwidth and 4200 DDR4X RAM? It appears that they want to take the memory bandwidth and ram specs of Graphics cards and bring it to the whole system, not just the GPU. These new Apple Silicon chips may have 256 Bit memory bandwidth, or 320, 384? And may be using DDR5 RAM? DDR6 RAM? Or something similar? That Unified Memory is accessed by all components, big fat pipes for everyone, GPU, CPU, Neural Engine, etc.

I get real excited by Apple and their chips because they, to me, are really being innovative and pushing boundaries. As much as I like tinkering and building systems, I also sometimes just want something that is fast and is pain free with no maintenance.

 

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Hi @basha :)

On 10/19/2021 at 12:47 AM, basha said:

I would love to get a tech insight from Affinity itself!

Unfortunately it's company policy that we can't recommend specific hardware, my apologies.

I have used a few of the newer M1 Apple devices (but of course not the new MacBook Pro yet!) and if you are looking at the 14" model, I don't personally believe you'll see much difference with the 2 additional CPU / GPU cores, but that will always depend on your specific workflow, how much 'multitasking' is being done, etc.

In my opinion, a general rule when RAM is non-user upgradeable is to purchase as much as your budget allows. Equally, the upgrade to 1TB of storage may be more beneficial than the 2 additional cores - but this is an incredibly expensive upgrade price for 500GB extra of storage!

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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14 hours ago, NotMyFault said:

It’s totally simple.

Pick the maximum spec device within your budget constraints.

As Apple devices are almost impossible to be upgraded (CPU, RAM, less GPU, ext. SDD) you should never purchase base spec models. These are an evil trap to catch Budget-restricted users into the Apple ecosystem, only to find out their are almost useless for professionals work. It’s good that you can sell them used for good value when you realize you need a beefier machine. RAM below 32 GB is kids toy (since 2018)

Wow ! You are saying 32GB of only RAM !! A lot of people work have never thought of the need so much of only RAM ! 

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I ordered an M1 Pro yesterday. Although I use all three Affinity apps, my primary app is Publisher. I used to do this professionally but I'm retired now so cost is more important to me than max performance. I actually find all of the apps have acceptable performance on my maxed out 2015 MBP and I bought a new machine only because this one is failing. I almost had to buy the previous model.

I'm using Publisher to lay out a long and complex book with hundreds of photos. I used to do this on an 8 mhz 68000 with 1 mb so I'm not phased by a little lag. I also know how to structure a book to avoid performance issues.

I expected that if I dawdled in making my decision I might face shipping delays - my delivery window is Nov 5 to 10 and I ordered within 30 minutes. I had planned to get 32GB and the base number of GPU cores but I didn't expect to have to choose between CPU core options. I quickly chose to stick with 16MB but bump up the CPU cores to 10. I think that was a mistake now but my rationale was that if Publisher can't handle my project I can always split the file into two but that there's nothing I can do later to add more CPU cores to speed it up. I wasn't worried about the GPU cores - anything will be better than Intel Iris graphics.

I looked at the benchmarks shared in the beta forum but while there were some benchmarks for M1 systems they were identical configs so they didn't help with my decision. That's why I pulled together the 1920 benchmarks that had been shared into a table. I'll update the table after a few M1 Pro and Max benchmarks have been shared but if you need to order immediately you'll have to go with your instinct.

 

Download a free manual for Publisher 2.4 from this forum - expanded 300-page PDF

My system: Affinity 2.4.0 for macOS Sonoma 14.4, MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)

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Just a little update to my earlier post about the new M1 chips.

Turns out Apple doubled the memory bandwidth of the original M1 chip, going from 128-bit to 256-bit in the M1 Pro chip with 16 or 32 GB of RAM. And then they doubled that to 512-bit for the M1 Max chip with 32 or 64 GB of RAM. They also went to faster DDR5 RAM.

And remember these are really, mid level chips, laptop chips, iMac and Mac Mini chips with lower power draw around 35-45 Watt TDP. What are truly professional Apple Silicon chips going to be like when Apple gives them a 65-100 watt TDP like Ryzen or Intel?

Apple doing their own custom silicon is bringing competition and influencing the chip industry. Having chips that consume less power and that are more efficient is good for all of us and the environment. I still laugh at how long I used a 2006 Intel Xeon Mac Pro as a media server and then finally replaced it with a custom built Ryzen 5 server. The laughter on my part was the noticeable drop in my electric bill!

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6 hours ago, Scungio said:

What are truly professional Apple Silicon chips going to be like when Apple gives them a 65-100 watt TDP like Ryzen or Intel?

I think it is possible Apple will never decide to design an M series chip with that high a TDP ... or need to. 

All 3 1.10.8, & all 3 V2.4.1 Mac apps; 2020 iMac 27"; 3.8GHz i7, Radeon Pro 5700, 32GB RAM; macOS 10.15.7
Affinity Photo 
1.10.8; Affinity Designer 1.108; & all 3 V2 apps for iPad; 6th Generation iPad 32 GB; Apple Pencil; iPadOS 15.7

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  • 1 month later...
On 10/20/2021 at 11:08 AM, Scungio said:

What are truly professional Apple Silicon chips going to be like when Apple gives them a 65-100 watt TDP like Ryzen or Intel?

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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On 10/18/2021 at 10:15 PM, NotMyFault said:

RAM below 32 GB is kids toy (since 2018)

That may be the case for traditional x86 systems. With Apple Silicon's ARM implementation, it's simply wrong. The architecture is different in a number of ways, and all chips of the M1 range get along with much less RAM, as was proven in countless reviews of the 2020 and 2021 models. Also, I fail to see how the base specs of the new MBP would be anything less than sufficient to outperform the vast majority of systems on which the Affinity suite is currently in use.

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Well usually one doesn't buy an M1 based computer just for using Affinity software, instead more in order to be able to use whatever software in general. Nowadays even the plain user would need to have enough RAM in order to perform certain tasks in a none blocking manner, like batch processing >100 huge RAW files in a fluiding manner, or cutting and convert/decode the last recorded vacation video etc.

Pros/Devs even need more RAM as usually since they have to run a bunch of RAM hungry interoperating processes at once (apps, dev tools, app servers, DBs etc.). So having enough RAM in reserve and a fast und huge enough SSD is an essentiell part of a computer for those as a working environment.

Another fact to concider is, if you buy for example a new notebook and afterwards recognize it has too low RAM, you can't upgrade it. Thus one has to buy with foresight, so that the hardware pays for itself over time and can be used longer time at all.

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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1 hour ago, kaffeeundsalz said:

With Apple Silicon's ARM implementation, it's simply wrong

This is equally wrong as my posts - both are simplifications.

Ok, Apple succeeded in boosting the performance out of 8 or 16 GB RAM by unified memory architecture. But this holds only to the point where your working set becomes larger than the available RAM. Even with SSD, paging RAM to SSD is dramatically slower than having enough RAM and no need for swapping. In case you have workloads requiring between 8 and 32 GB RAM, a system with that RAM, but otherwise much slower performance runs circle around the M1 device.

 

So we might agree on:

  • M1 is faster that most other current systems if working set fits in available memory
  • If your workload needs more RAM than available on M1 (not pro, not max), you can get better performance on other systems having enough RAM

I personally found that switching from 6 GB to 32 GB RAM gave me a bigger performance boost than a new CPU / GPU for my typical workload (lots of open browser windows eat lots of RAM). Your mileage may vary.

RAM matters more in case of stacking many large images, using large RGB/16 or RGB/32 or LAB/16 documents, working on Publisher documents who easily reach 1GB.

 

 

Mac mini M1 A2348 | Windows 10 - AMD Ryzen 9 5900x - 32 GB RAM - Nvidia GTX 1080

LG34WK950U-W, calibrated to DCI-P3 with LG Calibration Studio / Spider 5

iPad Air Gen 5 (2022) A2589

Special interest into procedural texture filter, edit alpha channel, RGB/16 and RGB/32 color formats, stacking, finding root causes for misbehaving files, finding creative solutions for unsolvable tasks, finding bugs in Apps.

 

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Well, in the end I opted for one of the higher end configurations: 14" M1 Max, 24-core GPU, 32GB memory, 1TB SSD.
I have seen enough tests and reviews to demonstrate that Affinity products function faster with these (or higher) specs in comparison to the standard configurations.

I had managed to bring my 13"M1 to a standstill with a particularly complex vector pattern in Designer, and the same file hardly stutters on this new machine – so I'm happy with my purchase!

I also buy with half an eye on re-sale in a couple or three years and it doesn't hurt to have something that's a little better than standard...

Anyway, we pays our money and we makes our choice – bottom line.

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14 hours ago, NotMyFault said:
  • M1 is faster that most other current systems if working set fits in available memory
  • If your workload needs more RAM than available on M1 (not pro, not max), you can get better performance on other systems having enough RAM

Yes, I think we can both agree on this 👍 It's clear that more RAM is always the fastest option if you really need it. But RAM demand has always been pretty low with Apple's ARM chipsets. We've seen similar effects e.g. on the iPhone and especially iPad. Earlier models had little RAM compared to their Android counterparts, yet were much faster in benchmarks. And I'm tempted to say that the number of people out there who really need 32 GB RAM or more in a Mac have somewhat decreased with the release of the M1 chips. Also, I think buying one of the new MBPs with 16 GB RAM will still make the Affinity Suite fly. As always, it depends on what you intend to do with it.

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10 hours ago, kaffeeundsalz said:

That may be the case for traditional x86 systems.

Not even there. I have been using an entry level 8GB MacBook Air now for about a year in 2D graphic design and have not experienced any problems (Affinity suite, Adobe Photoshop and some app development). We still have some older 8GB Windows workstations (besides more modern 16GB and 32GB machines) used for professional graphic design for about a decade using the Adobe CS6 Master suite and have never had any performance issues (all these computers use Intel i7 though, but not all even a dedicated video card). I think that M1 computers even with just 8GB RAM are perfectly capable of running anything at all in the realm of regular 2D graphic design, so any problems there might exist would likely to be due to bad memory management of the apps themselves. Heavy multitasking, dedicated video editing or 3D are a different thing, as is certainly gaming. I think this video puts things nicely in perspective:

 

 

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  • 1 month later...
On 10/18/2021 at 4:00 PM, basha said:

Hi, am looking to buy 1 of the the new M1 Pro 14inch MacBooks.

Which configuration do you recommend to best run your applications?
(CPU, GPU, Ram)

I don't need video configurations which is why I am ignoring the Max variations (unless you recommend otherwise).

Many thanks for your help!

For anybody still on the fence as to which configuration to buy, here's what I wish somebody could have told me before I ordered my 14" MacBook Pro.

I ordered the base 16GB of RAM, upped the CPU cores from 8 to 10, and kept the GPU cores at 14 instead of the optional 16. I had planned to order 32GB of RAM but I wanted to get my order in within minutes of availability and not wanting to spend too much, I decided more CPU cores might be more important than more memory given the praises people had given Apple Silicon's memory handling. I think that was a mistake. If I was doing it again I would order 32GB of RAM and leave the CPU cores at 8.

Several times in the past few weeks I've stared at the beachball and waited for macOS to do its thing because I've run out of memory, not just in Affinity apps but in system apps like Preview. Apple Silicon is great but the old saying that you can never have too much ram is still true. I think 16GB is usable for a lot of work but I wish I'd bought 32GB. I know I'm getting a boost from the extra CPU cores, at least for some of what I do, and more RAM did cost twice of what the extra CPU cores did, but I would reverse that decision. Even though the GPU is more important for rendering the canvas in Affinity I'm happy with the level of performance I'm getting there.

BTW, I've been keeping a benchmark list up to date over in the Windows Photo beta area - scroll to the bottom to see a comparison of several Mac and Windows systems.

 

Download a free manual for Publisher 2.4 from this forum - expanded 300-page PDF

My system: Affinity 2.4.0 for macOS Sonoma 14.4, MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)

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2 hours ago, MikeTO said:

here's what I wish somebody could have told me before I ordered my 14" MacBook Pro ...

 

Well I did and even in this thread ...

On 11/25/2021 at 11:32 PM, v_kyr said:

... Nowadays even the plain user would need to have enough RAM in order to perform certain tasks in a none blocking manner, like batch processing >100 huge RAW files in a fluiding manner, or cutting and convert/decode the last recorded vacation video etc.

Pros/Devs even need more RAM as usually since they have to run a bunch of RAM hungry interoperating processes at once (apps, dev tools, app servers, DBs etc.). So having enough RAM in reserve and a fast und huge enough SSD is an essentiell part of a computer for those as a working environment.

Another fact to concider is, if you buy for example a new notebook and afterwards recognize it has too low RAM, you can't upgrade it. Thus one has to buy with foresight, so that the hardware pays for itself over time and can be used longer time at all.

 

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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20 hours ago, v_kyr said:

Well I did and even in this thread ...

I ordered a month before then. I just believed the hype about M1 memory management more than my decades of experience of never cheaping out on memory. It's still amazing and I don't run out of memory every day, but I was surprised to hit that brick wall.

Download a free manual for Publisher 2.4 from this forum - expanded 300-page PDF

My system: Affinity 2.4.0 for macOS Sonoma 14.4, MacBook Pro 14" (M1 Pro)

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3 hours ago, MikeTO said:

I just believed the hype about M1 memory management more than my decades of experience of never cheaping out on memory.

Well you've better always believe more in your own experience, initial gut feeling and Murphys law here! The early M1 hypes were more based on synthetic benchmarks, single testings and the like. - And even if you follow hardware wise Moore's law, software does nowadays too in terms of complexity and it's overall needed memory resources.

For example, in my IT branch and for various customer related development projects, the customers always provide you with the hardware to use for development (mostly notebooks like 15"/16" Thinkpads or Macbook Pros). Those notebooks had one or two years ago at least 32 GB RAM and a fast 1 TB SSD. - Nowadays the hardware I get from customers for projects mostly has always 64 GB RAM and a 2 TB SSDs build in, thus trend wise a doubling of the memory resources!

☛ Affinity Designer 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Photo 1.10.8 ◆ Affinity Publisher 1.10.8 ◆ OSX El Capitan
☛ Affinity V2.3 apps ◆ MacOS Sonoma 14.2 ◆ iPad OS 17.2

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