But I was curious to hear from anyone out there who might already be working on a Mac Mini, iMac, or Macbook running on an M1 processor in a professional design capacity. By the time I'm ready to upgrade again I may well have decided to spend a little extra for a Mac Studio (all those ports would be useful), or it's possible Apple might introduce some sort of 'Mac Mini Pro' to fill the current $2000ish prosumer gap in their lineup. This is all very hypothetical for the moment, of course. So I'm wondering … am I overthinking my needs at this point? If chips like the M1 Pro and M1 Max and M1 Ultra are meant for hardcore rendering or compiling professionals, when I'm doing much more flat image editing and page layout type stuff? Would, say, a Mac Mini with an M1 processor and 16GB or memory actually be enough to handle my professional needs? Plus, of course, the M1 line has a completely new way of working that makes its speed and memory usage really hard to compare apples-to-apples with existing Intel lines of processors. Processors have obviously gotten a lot more powerful over the past two decades.

This got me thinking, though, about whether my whole purchasing philosophy is outdated. The new Mac Studio looks really sweet, but adding in a monitor makes for a significant jump up in price from the slightly-over-$2000 budget I usually allocate for my desktop upgrades. With the apparent phasing-out of the larger model iMac, I'm looking ahead - not immediately, but someday - to what my next machine will be. Currently I'm using one of the last Intel 5K iMacs, with 3.8GHz 8-core i7 processor and 40GB of memory. I'll occasionally rip a DVD to add to my digital collection but I don't really do anything like audio or video editing, 3D rendering or AR/VR, or code compiling.įor my professional life I've always tried to maintain a high-end 'prosumer' Mac desktop for my work … starting with the G3 and G4 mini-towers they used to make, then transitioning to the larger more powerful iMacs as Mac Pros became expensive and overpowered. Almost everything else is pretty lightweight - Numbers and Pages, Ulysses, Bear, etc. As such most of the heavy-duty professional apps I use from day to day are Photoshop (sigh), Affinity Designer, Photo, Publisher, and Sparkle.

I'm a graphic artist, designer, cartoonist, illustrator, etc, kind of jack-of-all-trades. So I thought I might ask here, where there there are probably more folks in a line of work more similar to mine! Hey folks! I've been pondering something for awhile now … I've been talking to some tech-educated friends about it, but none of them have been in the same line of work as me, so they're hesitant to make a solid opinion.

M1 illustrator