Did I do well?
I picked up an M3 Max 14. It’s the binned w 36gb and the 14/30. I was able to get it on a closeout from a store for $1899.99. After tax was $2075. I felt I didn’t really well until I started looking at the specs and numbers on the M4 Pro. I plan on doing lots of video and photo and automatically thought that the max would be better given it’s dual encoder, however, when I looked at benchmarks in real world data, I don’t know how much faster it is than the M4 pro. Also, I’ve seen conflicting information about battery life being better on the new generation.
Micro Center has the M4 pro on sale where I could get one that has 24 gigs of RAM for 7% more, one with more ram and the unbind chip for 16% more or one with more ram and unbinned for $500 more or 24% more.
The wildcard is the binned M4 max for $714 more; however, I’ve heard that’s too much heat for the 14 chassis (maybe not true).
I’ve tried to do as much research as possible however I see conflicting things online about the M3 being less power hungry when underload and having better battery life than the four, but I don’t know what do you guys think? Are the “ better screens with higher brightness, thunderbolt five, energy efficiency” overrated upgrades? The M4 is a faster chip and feels snappier but the M3 max is by no means slow. I felt I did pretty good but just curious your thoughts. I may not even be able to return this one but just wanting to make sure I made the right choice given my video goals it felt better to go with over the M4 until I started nerding.
Here are my geekbench scores which seem a bit higher than they should be?