Please help me choose a new Mac

[Yoshiii33524]

Hello,

Please help me choose a new Mac.

I will use a Mac for music production, graphic design, movie editing, 2D animation, and some 3D modeling/animation.

I would like to have two Macs, one for music production where I dont move it and the other Mac for the other things.

I have a 7950X AMD pc with a 3090Ti and maybe soon a 4090 for heavy 3D graphics rendering/animation.

If I do two Macs first, would a Mac Mini M2 Pro be good for music production? Or get a laptop? Or wait for the M3 Mac Mini?
If I do two Macs first, for the Mac for graphics, etc. should I go M3 Macbook Pro or Max?

I dont really have the space for a dedicated space for music production, so I am thinking of getting a Laptop for now and do everything on it and later once I have the space, buy a laptop or Mac Mini Pro for the music production Mac.

If I go with only a Macbook Pro for everything for now, should I go M3 Macbook Pro or Max? I have watch videos where it shows the Max has the ray tracing and is faster even for video editing.

Please help.

Suggestions please

 

[Bigwaff]

I will use a Mac for music production, graphic design, movie editing, 2D animation, and some 3D modeling/animation.

Do you currently have an investment in any software related to these computing activities?

 

[picpicmac]

Or wait for the M3 Mac Mini

Some of us are waiting for this... Real Soon Now.

There are extensive discussions about M2 Pro vs. M3 Pro for music. There's a thread on MacRumors covering this. Apparently some DAWs use the Performance cores of the M series and the base M3 Pro has one fewer (and you need to spend $ to get the unbinned M3 Pro.)

music production, graphic design, movie editing, 2D animation, and some 3D modeling/animation

All of these are very broad categories, but within each there is quite a range of requirements.

Example: for music production, how many samples do you typically load, and what music DAW do you use?

Example: for animation, are you wanting to get into generative AI?

And so on. What works for one photographer may not work for another. Some people work only with 50MB images, others work with 500MB images. And so on.


If I were you I'd just get the 16" MacBook Pro with M3 Pro base model (but order an SSD upgrade to say 1TB), ordered from Apple (for the return period), try it (heavily) for 7-10 days and see if it works for you. If it can't perform as well as you like then return it (within the window) and buy the M3 Max version.

 

[Yoshiii33524]

Do you currently have an investment in any software related to these computing activities?

Yes

 

[Bigwaff]

Do you currently have an investment in any software related to these computing activities?

Yes

Then what specific Mac models and hardware config, macOS version installed, and versions of invested software do you have? Depending on the answers, a new Mac may not be a straight forward selection.