Mac Studio m1 or m2

Compared to your 11-year old Mac, both the M1 & M2 will blow it out of the water. Comparing the M1 & M2 isn't so easy. Despite the differences in specs & performance tests (which make the two sound worlds apart), in real life I doubt you would see much difference unless you are doing a lot of intensive video compositing & rendering (which iMovie doesn't do).

There are also the cost & vendor factors. If buying used, make sure you can trust the vendor and that there is a no-questions-asked return policy. For that matter, I'd suggest looking at Apple Refurbished before considering the used computer market. Apple Refurbs are like new, come with Apple's standard warranty & are eligible for AppleCare. Regarding price, if the price of the new M2 is reasonably close to the cost of the used M1, I would think there is no question about buying the M2.

core GPU.

The more modern M2-chip in the latest Mac Studio has a 12-core CPU with 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, as well as a 30-core GPU.

Apple has made a number of claims about the new M2 series. Specifically, they've stated:

"M2 takes the industry-leading performance per watt of M1 even further with an 18 percent faster CPU, a 35 percent more powerful GPU, and a 40 percent faster Neural Engine.1 It also delivers 50 percent more memory bandwidth compared to M1, and up to 24GB of fast unified memory."

Websites like GeekBench that keep track of such scores show that these numbers are fairly spot on, though naturally, this depends on the specific chip. For instance, the Mac Studio M2 Ultra has up to a 20% faster CPU and 30% faster GPU than the Mac Studio M1 Ultra.

M2 series of chips versus the older M1.

The main page for the latest Mac Studio boasts up to 1.8x faster CPU performance, up to 3.6x faster GPU performance, and up to 4.4x faster machine learning.

Both the Mac Studio M1 and M2 Max have one video decode engine, two videos encode engines, and two ProRes encode and decode engines, so they're likely to perform similarly when handling high-definition files.

https://www.techradar.com/versus/mac-studio-m1-max-2022-vs-mac-studio-m2-max-2023-which-is-better

A new M2 Max Mac Studio with the 1 TB upgrade is $2199 USD

The Certified Refurbished store currently has a M1 Max Mac Studio with 1 TB of storage for $1709 USD ($490 less).

Keep in mind that M3 Max chips have been out for a while (in the 14" and 16" MacBook Pros). While Apple has not announced any release date for M3 Max and Ultra Mac Studios, it seems reasonable that there might be some this year – unless Apple decides to skip M3-generation models and go straight to M4-generation ones.