A few months ago Apple announced the brand new – M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max MacBook Pros. That’s a bit of a mouthful, but they look pretty impressive. As photographers, videographers, and creatives, it’s very easy to fall into that trap of thinking that you need to upgrade your computer.
After all, we arguably spend more time sitting at our desks with our heads on our computers, editing photos and videos than we do out in the world shooting those photos and videos. We need powerful computers to be able to keep up with us and everything we throw at them on a day-to-day basis, and it’s easy to think that we need the latest and greatest all of the time to be able to do that.
However, the chances are – you probably don’t need to upgrade as much as you think you do. I am using the M1 Pro MacBook Pro, – the base model with 16 gig of RAM, and 512 gigabytes of storage that I bought two years ago, almost to the day when it originally came out. When I got this laptop two years ago, it was easily the most powerful laptop computer that I had ever used, and it still runs like an absolute dream today. I’ve never had any issues with it at all, even after spilling a whole mug of hot – tea all over it. I’m not exaggerating when I say all over. I mean all over it. It was drowning. I only had it a few months at the time and I thought it was a goner, – but somehow it pulled through. It survived, and you would literally never know because it still runs like it’s brand new. I have absolutely hammered this laptop in the two years that I’ve owned it. I do all of my work as a full-time photographer and videographer on this computer, and I also do everything to do with my YouTube channel on here as well or editing all of my YouTube videos.
I dread to think how many photos and videos have been edited and processed and exported on this thing. Over those two years. I spent a lot of time on this laptop. Way too much more than I should probably. I practically live on it, but I’ve never had anything to complain about it, not even once. For my photography, I tend to work mainly in Lightroom and Photoshop as most photographers do, and for my video, I use Final Cut Pro probably 80% of the time. And for the bigger projects, I tend to use DaVinci because that has more organizational features inside it over the likes of Final Cut Pro.
However, Final Cut Pro is perfect for speed and ease of use, which is why I stick with that most of the time. But all of these creative apps are pretty heavy apps. They are pro-level apps, and the MacBook Pro – with the M1 Pro chip that is two years old now absolutely flies through all of them. They run so smoothly that there’s never any lag at all or dropped frames when you’re editing video. It never gets hot. It runs silently and that is perfect for creatives.
Going back to Final Cut Pro, it is optimized to work on the MacBooks so well as you would expect, because it is an Apple piece of software, but it seems like it barely uses any power at all. It’s very rare that I get anything like dropped frames when I’m editing video on this MacBook Pro, and if I do, – it is very minimal, and a couple of seconds later it’s figured itself out and it’s running entirely smoothly again. That goes for when I’m editing in DaVinci as well. It runs pretty much entirely as smoothly as Final Cut Pro. It never seems to slow down at all. I can’t, however, speak for Premiere because – I don’t go anywhere near it. Even though Lightroom and Photoshop run very well on here, I’d probably say that the Adobe apps seem to run a lot heavier and a lot – slower for some reason, and I’m not saying they’re slow because they’re not. They’re just a bit slower, and I’m not sure why. I don’t know if it’s just an Adobe thing.
The new chips that Apple are putting in their computers now. So – M1, M2, M3 and all of the different variations of those chips are so much more powerful than what we used to have on the Intel versions of these MacBooks. So that means that a 16 gig M1 Pro MacBook is going to run entirely differently from a 16 gig Intel chip MacBook Pro, and it still baffles me how capable even a 16 gig base model M1 Pro chip is. I can export a video in Final Cut Pro, edit photos inside Lightroom, listen to music, browse Safari, and browsing on Chrome. All of these different windows open while it is exporting videos, and it’s not going to struggle at all. It will just ” it’ll it just does it. It works. 512-gigabyte storage might not sound like a lot either, but I’m not really that bothered about that because I don’t store anything on the laptop itself apart from anything that does need to be stored on it.
So all of my apps and things like that, all of my footage, all of my photos, all of my documents they’re all stored on external drives or on iCloud. That’s just what works for me. It might work for you as well, but it also means that not only the computer works out cheaper, but the storage works out cheaper as well – because by an external storage is cheaper than upgrading the internal storage on your MacBook when you buy it Before this 14 inch MacBook Pro, I used to use the 16 inch Intel MacBook Pro, and as good as – that laptop was at the time, it used to get incredibly hot. Even just browsing Safari, that would be the case and the fans would kick in. And I’m not talking about just kicking in quietly. They were full blast, and when it came to editing video, that then became an issue because the laptop was running so loudly, and even when you were using external speakers, it was still very distracting. So editing any sort of music or audio was very difficult.
So the 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro at the time was a brilliant laptop overall. However, when – Apple started to put their chips inside these MacBooks, that was such a big leap forward. This 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro knocked that 16-inch MacBook Pro out of the park. It runs cool. There’s no – fan noise even when you are putting it through some very heavy tasks. The power and efficiency were just a massive jump forward. I thought over time that would become less noticeable. How wrong was I? I reckon over the two years that I’ve had this laptop, I can count on one hand, maybe two, just at a – push.
How many times I have heard the fans kick in on this laptop and it still runs as quickly and as smoothly as it ever has done. It is an absolute – tank. These things are genuinely built to last. Yes, occasionally you might hear a little – bit of bad press about something that might have potentially gone wrong, but if you look after them, they genuinely last and you don’t need to be upgrading every single year, it will easily last – you – three, four, five, maybe even six years.
This version of the M1 Pro isn’t actually available anymore, even though it is only two years old, because they have since updated to the M3. But if you do have an M1, M1 Pro, or M1 Max, and is there an M1 ultra as well, don’t feel like you need to be upgrading to the M3 anytime soon because you really don’t. These are still incredible laptops, incredible pieces of technology, and they will continue to be for a very long time. You can probably get an M1 Pro second-hand refurbished in near perfect condition, much cheaper than you can get an M3 anytime soon, and these are just as capable. They are incredible and they are perfect for photographers, videographers, anyone creative, you name it.
