For those artists interested:
My daily job is being an engineer and i do work in 3d CAD software. Huge models, hours per day, butter smooth experience, no rendering though.
I sold my personal microsoft i7 11gen 32gb ram rtx 3050ti laptop and got an m2 max 30 core.
Initially I got the14 inch pro 12 cpu 16gb ram model but i found that most of the time it was using the ssd because the ram was full. So I sent it back and got the 14inch 32gb max.
While working i love:
The display and how it is consistent in the colours in apps, and while switching. The display of the 14inch pro is awesome compared to microsoft surface and hp zbook, but i think it is also an issue of windows 10/11 that colors are different in different programs… Also what I see in Blender is exactly the same in adobe and safari/chrome browsers. Of course on my iphone everything is more saturated by a few % and on samsung phones is by quite a lot. I love “natural” colors more than saturated.
The Apple silicone is more than 10 times faster in showing eevee viewport. My 32gb i7 rtx3050ti would take even 1 minute to load all textures. Here it takes 3-5 seconds aaand - i can work in “butter smooth” fps. Blender does not show fps, only in animation, but as a guy who likes to model and move objects, draw on them etc, the laptop is responsive to input, and generally faster than the alternative (surface laptop with 3050)
The m2 has more cpu power so yeah is faster in renders, but I did not buy the laptop to render for hours, but to work and get renders in between.
Here is a “big” scene that i work on:
On the Surface RTX 3050ti i would get: 2 minutes and 1 second best time, without preserving data from previous render (if I do that, i have no more Vram to do anything, even the mouse pointer is slow. If I do a second render it will be 1:40 best). The 32gb ram and 4gb vram is just not enough, the laptop has a hard time and while working is possible, is just torture as everything is slowed down.
On the macbook pro 12cpu 19 gpu 16 gb ram
The render is almost the same at 1:25, but consistently getting there, and without video ram error. While rendering animation the rtx laptop would run out of memory or it will jump from 1minute 36 seconds to 2 minutes and 30 seconds max (when it was hot, and cooler at max). This is a huge plus for the mac because I can work and render with best optimisation available in 3.4.1 consistently. The problem I had was that half of the 3D scene was on the ssd because the ram was full, and even so while working, in edit mode, changing textures and more, this macbook was a lot faster and fluid than the 3050ti. It seemed perfect to work but i feared that using the ssd as ram will not be ok. But it was great to work on it, snappy, responsive, fluid.
On the macbook pro 12 cpu 32gb ram and 30 gpu, while working it feels a bit faster that the 19gpu model, it loads the textures even faster and editing using eevee is better but there was no big difference. The previous was good this one is good also. However I don’t put stuff on the ssd anymore so i expand the life of that component. The render is 1 minute long so a lot faster than the 3050ti and it is consistent. If i listen to music it will go up a bit and the laptop get warmer (far from hot), but I can better enjoy waiting the pixels to get in place.
If there is a mac to recommend, the M2 is the first one. Best value would be the 12 cpu 32 gb ram 19gpu and 512gb ssd. This is a 500€ save. The extra gpu power is useful perhaps in the future when and if Blender gets better in this regard. I did not make a custom laptop because is harder to find a buyer in a few years. People usually buy standard configs and not personalised .
Any questions? Ask!
