is it worth to upgrade to M2 Mac from 2019 Intel MB Pro?

hisdudeness

I was thinking of upgrading my Intel MacBook Pro 16”. 2019 (the last before M1)
The trade in value is now almost minimal
Given the cost to buy M2 do you think it a no brainer upgrade that justify buying a M2 Mac?
Or should I wait for some groundbreaking feature ? Since Apple quickly makes prior models obsolete

One cool feature is the “some” apps having universal compatibility.

Performance wise , other than the usual battery drain Ventura causes my MB is fine .

tobi77

It depends how much software / plugins you will use that rely on Rosetta. They can it performance.

cyberheater

It’s a massive boost in performance if you use Rosetta or not. Well worth the upgrade.

swarmboy

I just upgraded from a i9 mbp to an m2 ultra studio and it's like night and day - boots from cold in less than 10 seconds, and for me the most important thing, no matter what I throw at it the fan never comes on, whereas my mbp was like a jet engine / throttled all the time.

On the laptop side, the 16" M2 is much better than the 14" in terms of heat / throttling, I've heard.

I've also heard it's probably worth waiting for the m3 (much more significant boost in power from M1, better battery life if you're getting a laptop), but I had to take the leap...

swarmboy

and fwiw, there are only a handful of plugins that aren't apple silicon ready - I'm not using rosetta at all.

Tarekith

It will be one the biggest improvements in CPU you’ll ever experience when buying a new computer, definitely well worth it. I wouldn’t think twice about it.

espiegel123

Even getting a MacBook Air M1 would be a big performance boost from what I understand.

swarmboy

@espiegel123 said:
Even getting a MacBook Air M1 would be a big performance boost from what I understand.

Definitely. My daughter’s M1 air outperformed my 16” i9 significantly. Only when it was under real load did it start to throttle.

Hmtx

remember back when we all got our first SSD based computer… the upgrade from hard disks was mind-blowing how much the performance improved.

The switch from intel to the M1 feels like that. Its not quite that drastic, but the difference in processing speed is amazing. Rendering videos, rebooting, its all so much faster.

Take that how you want... but I imagine most people who finally upgrade to M1 or M2 have no regrets other than wishing they had done it sooner.

Also you can find deals on a 16” M1 Pro that will save a lot of money over the cost of a new M2 but still have an amazing improvement over your Intel Mac.

hisdudeness

@swarmboy said:
I just upgraded from a i9 mbp to an m2 ultra studio and it's like night and day - boots from cold in less than 10 seconds, and for me the most important thing, no matter what I throw at it the fan never comes on, whereas my mbp was like a jet engine / throttled all the time.

On the laptop side, the 16" M2 is much better than the 14" in terms of heat / throttling, I've heard.

I've also heard it's probably worth waiting for the m3 (much more significant boost in power from M1, better battery life if you're getting a laptop), but I had to take the leap...

Thanks ..that helps

Telefunky

@cyberheater said:
It’s a massive boost in performance if you use Rosetta or not. Well worth the upgrade.

Just to add some context:
Rosetta performs great, if it has to deal with plain Intel machine code, delivering the performance of a 3GHZ i5 on a M1 (also about 3GHZ), impressive for a code translator.

This may change a lot, if the original Intel code is either clumpsy or optimized in a way that Rosetta cannot handle equally well, like certain DSP extensions or similar stuff.

hes

@cyberheater said:
It’s a massive boost in performance if you use Rosetta or not. Well worth the upgrade.

I doubt whether the performance increase would be enough in itself for me to upgrade from 2019 MB Pro. But add in the silence, cool-running, and long battery life features of the M1/M2 and I'd say it's more than enough.