Upgrading from a 2019 MacBook Pro i9 to the latest M chip

If your doing emulation you need as much RAM as possible. Are you trying to migrate to a new machine? Are you trying to do a hardware upgrade? not all M-CPU will work on your legacy PC. Call support to get details on hardware upgrades. Chances are tier-1 support wont be able to answer your question so schedule a tier-2/3 call back.

berrywhitetiger wrote:

If your doing emulation you need as much RAM as possible. Are you trying to migrate to a new machine? Are you trying to do a hardware upgrade? not all M-CPU will work on your legacy PC. Call support to get details on hardware upgrades. Chances are tier-1 support wont be able to answer your question so schedule a tier-2/3 call back.

The OP mentioned "doing some machine learning and playing around with LLMs". I didn't see any reference to running things in emulation (other than iOS apps under development, within the Xcode environment) or running them in virtual machines.

Note that M-series Macs do not support Boot Camp, and cannot run Intel-based operating systems – such as "regular" distributions of Windows and Linux – in virtual machines. A virtual machine on an Apple Silicon Mac would only run ARM-based operating systems like Windows 11 for ARM, or some ARM builds of Linux.

There is no hardware upgrade to put a M-series chip into a legacy PC. Apple designs their own processors but doesn't sell processors for use in other vendors' computers, the way that Intel and AMD do. Want a computer which has an Apple Silicon processor? Buy an Apple-Silicon-based Mac …

ruffyleafpainter wrote:

Thanks for the response!. Not doing a hardware upgrade, but upgrading to a new MBP. My mid-2019 is kaput atm. So the choices are to fix 2019 mbp, or buy a new 2025 MBP.

I prefer the mid-2019 form factor and keyboard, so not really looking forward to getting the new MBP. If I do, would the base specs suffice?

MacBook Pros are available with three levels of M4-family chips: plain M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max. MBPs with higher-end chips have more CPU cores, more GPU cores, better external display/expansion support, and can potentially be ordered with a lot more RAM.

However, all three of those chips have a 16-core "Neural Engine" (for accelerating certain types of machine learning computations). Even a MacBook Pro based on a plain M4 chip can drive two external displays with the lid open and can be ordered with up to 32 GB of RAM.

If your application involves machine learning and LLM, you might not want to skimp on the RAM. You cannot expand RAM on any Apple Silicon Mac after purchase, so be sure to (custom-)order whatever you will need.

A mid-2019 MacBook Pro with a Core i9 would probably be a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2019). You couldn't get an i9 in the 13" models, and the 16" model didn't come out until November. MacTracker shows Geekbench scores: 1389 (single-core) / 6288 (multi-core).

For a 14" MacBook Pro with a plain M4 chip, the scores would be 3813 (single-core) / 14317 (multi-core).

These scores are very CPU-centric and don't tell you anything about relative GPU strength – or about acceleration that machine learning computations using Apple's Machine Learning framework might get from the plain M4 chip's 16-core Neural Engine.

M4 Pro and M4 Max chips would have similar single-core CPU scores, and higher multi-core CPU scores.