New Chief User Looking For Mac Book Pro Laptop

[SBarnett]

Hello,

I am a student and will be using the Chief Architect Software in the coming Fall semester. The version I will have access to will be the X16 student version. I am looking into purchasing a Mac book pro laptop to be able to run this program and am hoping some of you might have some suggestions. I am looking at a 14" Mac book pro with the M4 chip, 16GB Ram, 512 SSD, 10 core CPU and 10 core GPU as a good starter laptop for this program. I am wondering if anyone has experience running Chief on the M4 chip? Has it worked well for you? There is also the M4 pro chip out there which is more powerful, but I'm not sure if I will actually need this or if the plain M4 would work just fine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you so much,

S Barnett

[PitMan71]

https://www.chiefarchitect.com/products/sysreq.html

 

This may help.

[SBarnett]

Thanks!

[GrizzL]

I have an M2 Max Studio 64gb RAM and a 15" M2 MacBook Air 24gb RAM that I have run x15, 16 and now 17 on.

In my experience both machines run complex plan and layout files with ease for me.

If CA is the most demanding software you plan on running I would consider the 15" M4 Air and increase the RAM to 24gb and save a few hundred bucks if that means anything to you. You will appreciate the larger screen real estate when not connected to a monitor and also the portability of the Air. The only difference I notice between the two machines is if it takes the M2 Max 5 seconds to export a layout to pdf, it takes the M2 10 seconds so I'm sure the base M4 is at least somewhere in between there. I have also used CA with a MacBook M4 Pro 24gb RAM with zero discernable difference. So as long as your workflow doesn't have you exporting files hundreds of times per day any of the new Mac devices should work great for CA.