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Unless your RAM requirements aren’t being met, the M1 is good enough. The M2 is the best of the line so far because the M3 handicapped memory bandwidth for the only use cases that need so much memory.

M4 is tempting and a decent time to upgrade if you’ve had an M1 since 2020 or 2021, but its exact specifications aren’t know for all lines yet.

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Is the M3 “worse” than the M2?

M3 Pro (and some lower-core count M3 Max) parts have lower memory bandwidth than their M2 comparable. If your workload is highly dependent on memory bandwidth, then M2->M3 on Pro or Max might not be an improvement.

See tables here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2#Variants

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M3#Variants

On CPU/GPU benchmarks the M3 comes out ahead of the M2 (all flavors in like-for-like comparisons, plain, pro, max). However the M3 Pro and some M3 Max's have lower memory bandwidth than their M2 counterparts.

So a plain M3 is better than a plain M2. The top end M3 Max is better than the M2 Max. For the rest, you have to do a comparison and determine based on your intended use-cases, but for most people the M3 {Pro,Max} will be better than the M2 equivalent.

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