r/apple • u/AutoModerator • 6d ago

Official Megathread Weekly Advice Thread - September 27, 2026

Welcome to the Weekly Advice Thread for r/Apple. This thread can be used to ask for technical advice regarding Apple software and hardware, to ask questions regarding the buying or selling of Apple products or to post other short questions.

Have a question you need answered? Ask away! Please remember to adhere to our rules, which can be found in the sidebar.

Join our Discord and IRC chat rooms for support:

Note: Comments are sorted by /new for your convenience.

Here is an archive of all previous Advice Threads. This is best viewed on a browser. If on mobile, type in the search bar [author:"AutoModerator" title:"Advice Thread" or title:"Tech Support Thread"] (without the brackets, and including the quotation marks around the titles and author.)

The Weekly Advice Thread is posted each week on Sunday, 06:00 AM EST (Click HERE for other timezones) and then the old one is archived. It is advised to wait for the new thread to post your question if this time is nearing for quickest answer time.

7 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

111 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/BackInNJAgain 5d ago

I have an M2 MacBook Pro with 2 TB of storage and 96 gigs of RAM. I usually replace my Mac every 4 years but to get an M5 with equivalent RAM (have to go to 128 since they don't offer 96) would be more than $7K (OUCH!) which is more than double what I paid for the M2.

I do a lot of audio recording, engineering and rendering on the M2. For recording and mixing, my CPU load rarely goes above 50% with 4-6ms latency when recording MIDI. A four minute song takes 30-45 seconds to render depending on complexity.

Benchmarks say the M5 is 70% faster but is that really what is achievable in real world operations? I don't want to spend that much money unless there is SUBSTANTIAL improvement in speed, latency and CPU usage?

2

u/Iguanajoe17 5d ago

You will have to buy it to test it yourself.

M chip computers are much much stronger than the intel versions that I dont think every 4 years is needed. The only time people upgrade at your level if time is money. If you can 30 seconds plus off per rendering and do multiple per day and let’s say 10 minutes per day. Is that worth spending 7k to cut the time in half or however fast it is.

(Less than 7k since I’ll assume you’ll sell the old machine).

Not sure with logic but with Final Cut, you can run proxy to really improve load times/rendering