I'm a graphic designer and have decided that its finally time to put my 2014 iMac out to pasture - it's had a good good innings.

The new MacBook Pro's with M4 are looking pretty banging, so I'm just deciding on the what config will handle my workflow best and be most future-proof.

Generally I'll have Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign & Acrobat open as well as between 10 to 20 browser tabs.

I believe a good amount of RAM is priority, so my main quandary is which CPU to choose.

My understanding is that the above Adobe apps are mostly single-threaded, so is anything above the base M4 is just a waste of money?

Though could those apps move to multi-threaded in the future? (ideally I'd like to get 5 to 10 years out of this thing)

The 14" MBP (base M4) with 24Gb is £1800, or I could upgrade to 32Gb for £2000...

Alternatively, if I'd legit benefit from moving to an M4 Pro, with all those extra cores and memory bandwidth (and thunderbolt 5 ports), I'd be looking at £2K for 24Gb & £2400 for 48Gb (you can't select anything between 24 & 48 for M4 Pro config for whatever reason...)

I'm buying through my business so by the time I remove VAT & tax I'm essentially paying just under half the sticker price, so the ram upgrades aren't quite as onerous as if I was buying for personal use.

My design files are stored in dropbox so think  512Gb should do me.

Finally, I'm guessing gaming on Mac is still just a novelty at this stage and shouldn't factor into my thinking?

Any steer would be appreciated.

I'd have thought if you're a graphic designer, you'd want a desktop with a huge monitor? Surely the laptop is just for when you go to customers?

I've been waiting for newer chips for the Mac Studio. It's still on the M2.

This is one of my current Macbook Pro builds, the 2nd one is almost identical (a little less horsepower), and much of the software/programs I use still isn't fully utilizing what these builds can do.  I usually just max everything out on the build but hold back on max storage (most of my storage is on 4 external ssds for redundancy).  If I were to upgrade to the M4, the bulk of the software I use wouldn't get enhanced for it for months or years later.  

What I need most is the RAM, thats why I'm going to hold out a little longer for a new Mac Studio. I'm not sure what software you're using for your Graphics design, but going with the largest build you can afford may not pay off immediately, but could be very rewarding years down the road.  

Yeah, I have a 27 inch monitor that I'll hook the macbook up to then use the MBP's screen as a secondary for emails & teams.

The amazing thing about the M processors is that there's no apparent difference between the performance of laptop vs desktop (with the exception of the MBA due to it having no fan).

If early M4 benchmarks are to be believed they seem to have a couple of years lead in terms of performance & power efficiency over AMD/Qualcomm/Intel.

Intel have actually come out and said that, for financial reasons their future chips won't have memory-on-chip, which is a major reason they made up ground with Lunar Lake, so their resurgence may well be short-lived...

I use Abobe Illustrator/InDesign/Photoshop, none of which require the gargantuan specs you've posted above haha. With that said, the M4 Pro is supposedly superior to the M3 Max in many ways, which is kind of nuts.

Guessing you're rendering or running complex modelling software to require that kind of grunt.

I'm also Scottish, we're known for our stinginess, ain't no world where I'd part with over 5K for a laptop!

Hello

For your workflow, the base M4 with 32GB RAM is the best balance of performance and future-proofing. Adobe apps are mostly single-threaded, so the base M4 is plenty powerful, and 32GB will handle multitasking well. The M4 Pro is overkill unless you plan to do more intensive tasks like video editing or 3D work in the future. You can check https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/Azure documentation guide for help. 

Max out the ram if you are keeping it for a few years.

Finally!   Been excited for this to finally be a thing.  Gonna take a few more days to think about it.  I might add some more SSD storage, but I store most of my stuff externally. The 512 GB unified memory is unreal.  I was expecting to be capped at 256 GB.

I'm glad I didn't build one with the M2 and decided to wait.

Since the thread was bumped thought I'd mention that I plumped for the M4 pro (binned) and 24gb ram back in December.

Maybe Adobe software will go multithreaded over the coming years...

Unsurprisingly it's blazingly fast compared to my 11 year old mac i7 mac.

Hopefully I'll get around a decade out of this one as well!

I'm still using this macbook right now, going on 13 years.  I recently took it apart and installed a new larger battery to replace the original one (also did a full cleaning).  I also replaced an old charger, but that's it.  

I've had great experiences since I dumped PC builds and went to mac.  I know their products are extremely expensive, but when they last as long as they do, I feel like the cost offsets.  

I currently use 3 macbooks, 1 Imac, and want to add the mac studio.