Which one should I buy

Hi rakibahammed,

IMO, regular M1 is geared more towards better battery life, at a slight performance cost, while M1 Pro and M1 Max are geared more towards high performance, at the cost of less battery life. This is mainly due to how their CPU cores are skewed.

All M1 family chips have a mixture of performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores. Performance cores can execute tasks 3x faster than efficiency cores, but consume 10x more power.

• Regular M1 has 4 P cores, and 4 E cores.

• M1 Pro and M1 Max each have 8 P cores, and 2 E cores. (The binned M1 Pro chip has 6 P cores, and 2 E cores.)

Since M1 Pro and M1 Max are skewed more towards P cores, the E cores likely have to ramp up their clock speed when lots of low-performance tasks need to run, or offload some tasks onto the P cores. This results in shorter battery life (note the web browsing times between the M1 MacBook Air and the 14/16" MacBook Pros).

https://www.apple.com/ca/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-M1,MacBook-Pro-14,MacBook-Pro-16-2021

With that said, I would probably recommend the M1 Pro or M1 Max chip for gaming instead of regular M1 (due to better compute performance):

• If you need ridiculously powerful graphics (GPU) or 64 GB of RAM, grab the M1 Max chip.

• Otherwise, get the M1 Pro chip.

Also, as others have noted, be sure to future-proof your computer. You can't change the processor and RAM after purchase.

Since you cannot add memory or install a larger disk at a later date, buy the most you can afford. The highest amount or RAM and the largest disk drive. This will serve you well now and go about as far as you can to "future proof" your Mac.

As far as the processor goes, same reasoning ... no post purchase onboard upgrades so buy the most powerful one you can afford.

My purchase advice:

Go for the largest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and the highest amount of memory that you can afford.

Good Luck with your decision! 😉

How is this related to 12" Retina MacBooks, the forum area that you have posted?