MacBook Pro Max – Luxurious Speed!

Updating computers to me is traumatic for the simple reason I come to thing of them as dear friends. My MacBook 2019 had served me very well and gone on many adventure saving my butt more times than I can count. But it’s time had come to be replaced. Whatever I got had big shoes to fill and so I went searching for info and advice. I decided to wait to the very last minute to pull the trigger and got the 16″ MacBook Pro Max with the M2 chip. It is simply spectacular and by far the best Mac I’ve ever owned and already have saved the day!

Why the Pro Max? I have the M1 iMac and really have enjoyed its performance so there was no hesitation to go M2. I went with the Pro Max for a couple of reasons. The biggest was speed when working with video editing with Premier when away from the office. Next was dealing with big uploads / ingests. For example last week in FL & LA with Snail Kites and airshow, 24:33 for 9096 Nefs. Then filing them to external 8TB SSD drive, with 40MPBs cable, blistering speed. This is the only way I know I can buy time and time is as essential to me. What’s loaded in the Pro Max?

• 2TB SSD storage
• 96GB unified memory
• Apple M2 Max with 12-core CPU, 38-core GPU,
16-core Neural Engine
• 140W USB-C Power Adapter
• Three Thunderbolt 4 ports, HDMI port, SDXC card slot, headphone jack, MagSafe 3 port
• Accessory Kit
• 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display

I went with the 2TB rather then all the way with 4TB to save a little coin but more importantly, it’s all the space I figured I would need. The size SSD permits me to shoot for a day, ingest all those images and then if the worse happens, have enough to rescue a card. Well, that exact thing basically happened. On my last day of my Snail Kite shoot, the external SSD crashed during the backup. I had the backup from the day before so nothing was lost but I had to “rescue” the shoot from the current day (using ProGrade Recovery Pro) and edit the days shoot again. The Pro Max did a killer job and no images were lost. Phew!

The Pro Max is a tad heavier and a tad thicker but it no biggie. I didn’t have to buy any new accessories which was nice. I did get a Mag Cable for on the road and so happy Apple has gone back to that for power. I have gone through all my cables to make sure I have nothing but 40MPBs speed. I’ve gotten the latest ProGrade CFexpress cards reader for max speed ingesting and with that, I’m all set for speed. And with that, I have a new best friend and travel companion that I really enjoy!

Note: I did do a complete clean install of all apps rather than using the very convenient and effective “move” that copies old Macs to new. The reason … this was my 5th MacBook and thought it was time to do a clean install. It was real simple so glad I did it!