See Refurbished Mac

I was perusing Apple Certified Refurbished store this morning over coffee and noticed that M3 Pro and Max MacBook Pros are now available for purchase. Some with 24 hour shipping. If you’ve been holding out on upgrading to M3 Pro or Max now is your chance.

Should You Upgrade?

Depends if you currently own a higher speed M1 or M2 Pro or Max Machine probably not.

If you bought a base model M1 or M2 Pro or Max or the vanilla M1 or M2 then maybe.

If you’re still on an intel MacBook Pro welcome to the party. Now might be the time to make the jump to Apple Silicon. If you can stomach the upgrade price.

Things To Know Before You Pull The Trigger

macOS cannot be downgraded from Sonoma after purchase. Sonoma was made for M3 and that’s the lowest you can go in terms of macOS versions on any M3 machine. Period. If these refurbished MacBooks are shipping with MacOS 14.4 be warned there have been reports of PACE/iLok licensing issues.

The following companies have issued reports about 14.4 compatibility issues.

Avid
UAD
LiquidSonics
Neural DSP
Among others see Apple Forums

I myself am running macOS Sonoma 14.4 on an M1 Max MacBook Pro and have not had any issues with Pro Tools Ultimate, Logic Pro, Ableton 12, Cubase 12 or Vienna Ensemble Pro 7 as of late. My current template and active projects have all been working fine.

Please note that I currently run Pro Tools, and Cubase 12 in Rosetta Mode.

Ableton 12, Logic Pro, Vienna Ensemble Pro 7 are all running fully natively.

Planning to switch back to running Pro Tool Ultimate back to fully native later on this week. We’ll see how it goes now that Pro Tools is supposedly fully Sonoma compatible.

Will I Upgrade

My 16 inch M1 Max (10‑Core CPU and 32‑Core GPU – Space Gray 64GB RAM and 4TB SSD) is still rocking and doing fine over 2.5 years in to be my daily driver and desktop laptop.

I have run into some software issues with MacOS Ventura 13.5, 13.6 and all versions of Sonoma. For some reason my Cal Digit TS4 Dock intermittently prevents restarts from time to time. The MacBook boots up and restarts fine when not plugged into the TS4. Firmware on the TS4 is current and up to date. The most annoying issue has been Finder crashing with no explanation. On 14.4 this seems to have been resolved so far…

But overall this Mac is the best Mac I have owned so far. I am able to handle all of my work on one machine with little friction.

From film score cue creation to Final Cut Pro video edits. My 16 inch M1 Max has been solid.

Over 2.5 years in and the battery still gets me through a full day of basic work. I rarely plug into the wall when out in the field or working out of commercial studios.

If I Was To Upgrade

I would get the highest spec 16 inch model in Silver (not currently available refurbished) with 128 GB Of RAM, 8TB SSD, 16-Core CPU, 40-Core GPU. Space Black is cool, but I like to switch color ways each upgrade cycle. I am currently in my Space Gray Era.

The reason for this high spec bump is because I firmly believe that any upgrade purchase should be double your current spec at minimum.

So for example if you currently have a 512 GB MacBook 2017 Intel with 16 GB of RAM and a quad core processor, the minimum spec bump you should invest in is a M3 Pro with 1TB SSD and 36 GB of RAM. M1 and M2 Pros with 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of RAM are also acceptable upgrade candidates.

Be sure to check out Apple’s comparison chart when considering a MacBook purchase.

The Argument for an M1, M2 Pro or Max Upgrade Path

1. M1 Max could be downgraded to macOS Monetary
2. M2 Max could be downgraded to macOS Ventura
3. You will likely save several hundred to a thousand or so dollars on a slightly used model.
4. The performance jump from intel based MacBooks to M1 Max is noticeable if all your software is compatible.
5. All day battery life is possible.
6. The same spec, in silver, M1 Max 16 MacBook I purchased used in December 2021 is almost half the cost now.
7. The trade off of getting a M1 or M2 Macbook is you will likely get five more years of macOS upgrades on M1 Max and 6 on M2 Max from today’s date. Compared to 7 years with the purchase of an M3 based machine. Apple’s timeline of Apple Silicon macOS upgrades isn’t really clear. But in the intel era Machines were getting 7 years of updates on average.
8. Apple Care+ cannot be added to used MacBooks outside of the initial 60 day new purchase window in the U.S
9. M1 or M2 Max is preferable to M3 Pro due to the doubling of the memory bandwidth, extra performance cores and graphics cores. In addition to the supporting of several more external display compared to any variation of the M1,2, or 3 Pro models.

Where To Buy

Apple Certified Refurbished Site
Amazon Renewed Store
B&H Photo Used
Computer Overhauls
eBay-ItsWorthMore

Models To Avoid

All Intel Based Macs. The pricing may be temping, but you will be out of macOS upgrades by 2026 or 2027 at the latest.

So your investment won’t cary you as far. Not to mention that intel MacBooks tend to run very hot, thermal throttle and underperform relative to their internal specs.

It’s also ok to hold on to your intel based Mac mini and Mac Pro and even MacBook Pro a little longer if everything is still working fine. The goal with computers is to have them get out of the way so we creatives can work.

But if you’re running into issues or hitting a wall with a lower powered an aging Mac there are lots of upgrade paths available to you that don’t involve buying the absolute newest and most expensive Macbook.

Minimum MacBook Pro Specs For Audio Engineer

M1, M2, M3 Max
1TB SSD
64GB RAM

Minimum MacBook Pro Specs for Music Producers, Creatives and Composers

M2, M3 Max
1TB SSD
96GB RAM (Note: on M3 Max you get less CPU and GPU cores with the 96GB of RAM SKU)

Reviews

Six Colors
Verge M3 Max
Verge M2 Max
Verge M1 Max
Mac Rumors
Apple Insider
Apple Insider

Links And Things

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Written on MacBook Pro and iPad Pro using Drafts Pro in Markdown.

Disclosure: Ian LeCheminant is an affiliate partner with Amazon. When you click a link and make a purchase, he may receive a small commission.