I don't know much about modern Geekbench scores, but it that chart seems to show that M1s are still pretty good? It appears that M4 is only about 50% faster. Somehow I would expect more like 100% improvement.
Flameproof suit donned. Please correct me because I'm pretty ignorant about modern hardware. My main interest is playing lots of tracks live in Logic Pro.
Some of it depends on which variant fits you best. But yeah, in general the M1 is still very good--if you hear of someone in your circle selling one for cheap because they're upgrading, nab it.
On the variants: An M1 Max is 10 CPU cores with 8 power and 2 efficiency cores.
M4 Max is 16 cores, 12 + 4. So each power core is 50% faster, but it also has 50% more of them. Add in twice as many efficiency cores, that are also faster for less power, plus more memory bandwidth, and it snowballs together.
One nice pseudo-feature of the M1 is that the thermal design of the current MacBook Pro really hasn't changed since then. It was designed with a few generations of headroom in mind, but that means it's very, very hard to make the fans spin on a 16" M1 Max. You have to utilize all CPU/GPU/NPU cores together to even make them move, while an M3 Max is easier to make (slightly) audible.
> it's very, very hard to make the fans spin on a 16" M1 Max. You have to utilize all CPU/GPU/NPU cores together to even make them move,
I routinely get my M1 fans spinning from compiling big projects. You don’t have to get the GPU involved, but when you do it definitely goes up a notch.
I read so much about the M1 Pros being completely silent that I thought something was wrong with mine at first. Nope, it just turns out that most people don’t use the CPU long enough for the fans to kick in. There’s a decent thermal capacity buffer in the system before they ramp up.
Huh! I regularly max CPU for long stretches (game development), but I found I could only get the fans to move if I engaged the neural cores on top of everything else. Something like a 20+ minute video export that's using all available compute for heavy stabilization or something could do it.
The M3 is much more typical behavior, but I guess it's just dumping more watts into the same thermal mass...
The M1 was pretty fast when it debuted. If you own an M1 Mac its CPU has not gotten any slower over the years. While newer M-series might be faster, the old one is no slower.
The M1s are likely to remain pretty usable machines for a few years yet, assuming your workload has not or does not significantly change.
Flameproof suit donned. Please correct me because I'm pretty ignorant about modern hardware. My main interest is playing lots of tracks live in Logic Pro.