M3 Mac performance vs 2018 Intel MacBook Pro

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M3 Mac performance vs 2018 Intel MacBook Pro

I have a 15-inch Intel MacBook Pro from 2018. It is a 2,6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 with Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB with 500GB SSD and 16 GB RAM.

I use it mostly to lots of Adobe Creative Cloud, mostly InDesign and Illustrator.

I am thinking of upgrading to either:

15-inch MacBook Air M2 with 24GB unified memory and 1 GB SDD (maxed out version!)
16-inch MacBook Pro M3 Pro with 36GB unified memory and 1 GB SDD.

So my questions are:

How big is the performance boost for these machines in relation to Intel Macs?
Can the MacBook Air M2 deal with large scale InDesign/Illustrator work?

Looking forward to your comments!

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 14.1

Posted on Dec 5, 2023 4:59 AM

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Answer 1

DK Deadhead Author

Level 1

5 points

Dec 5, 2023 7:57 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks for replying! The answer is simple: My Intel Mac is starting to be very slow, especially with large Adobe projects/files. I am typically working on large graphics-heavy projects, with 100+ A3 pages. A typical workflow might be a large InDesign project with a linked Illustrator file that has to be edited, and then the updated InDesign file gets exported to pdf and opened in Acrobat.

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