Hi all its time to upgrade to a new mac i don’t know what to buy in 2025. I have a intel macbook pro with intel i7 16 gb ram and and 512 gb harddisc i am looking at an macbook pro 16 with 24 gb ram and 512 gb harddisc and m4 pro or alternativ macbook air with m4 16 gb ram and 512 gb disc. I will use it for sound editing and maybe music production and normal use mail web browsing an tekst edit. Is the air faster compared to my old computer or is the macbook pro a better obtion for my use case?
Best regards kasper
By Kasper Antonsen, 24 June, 2025
Forum
Apple Hardware and Compatible Accessories
Comments
Not useful comment
My comment might not be useful however the only thing I can tell is that the Air is a very capable machine. The only thing is the fan and for your use case I do not know but it might not be a problem.
Anything M-series is better
All M-series chips since the M1 give anything with Intel apple has built at the same price range a humiliating beating in all possible scenarios, and by huge I mean they run circles around their Intel counterparts, with single-core performance on the M-series sometimes closely matching multi-core performance on equivalently priced Macs with Intel chips.
When the first M1 Macs came out I had a mostly baseline 2017 Intel iMac, which I only upgraded to 16GB of RAM because the baseline model only had 8GB, and a 256GB SSD because the baseline model still came with an HDD. After buying the baseline M1 MacBook Air upgraded to 16GB of RAM that I am still using as a laptop these days I decided to measure the time it took to compile one of my Rust projects and couldn't even believe the results, because whereas the 2017 iMac took roughly 90 seconds to compile the code, the 2020 M1 MacBook Air took just 12 seconds, so the mostly baseline M1 MacBook Air beat the mostly baseline 2017 iMac by 7.5 times. This was a real use case, where all the components contributed synergigcally to a better overall performance, but what I said above about single-core performance of M-series Macs sometimes getting close to the multi-core performance of the last Intel Macs at the same performance bracket is stuff straight out of benchmarks.
I always opt for the higher-end hardware
I've always purchased a MacBook Pro. However, I keep hardware for as long as I reasonably can, and I delay upgrading until there's a strong reason to do so. Given this strategy, choosing the better-performing product makes good sense, as the demands imposed by the software will only increase with time.
If I were buying now, which I'm not, I would wait for the next generation of Apple Silicon to be released, and buy a MacBook Pro at that point, maximizing the number of operating system releases it would receive until Apple stopped supporting it.
This is only one strategy, of course. There are other reasonable approaches. I would suggest considering what is often referred to as the total cost of ownership, and how long you expect the hardware to last before there's a strong justification to upgrade. Then decide what would be a reasonable investment under those conditions, bearing in mind that you can't upgrade individual components later on - you can only upgrade the entire machine.
As far as I know, the accessibility services, including VoiceOver, don't greatly add to the CPU load or memory usage under normal conditions, so the audio editor would be your most demanding application.
I agree with the earlier comment on Apple Silicon. It's impressive, and it improves appreciably with each new generation.