Is Macbook pro m2 pro or Macbook m2 max worth it over m4 air for programmers (backend + DL)?

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Hey, i am getting macbook pro m2 pro 16gb - 512gb in a similar price range as macbook air m4 16-512, and m2 max just slightly higher than that. Is m2 pro pro worth over m4 air in december 2025 that is almost 2026? I am software developer and i work on backend (docker containers etc) and learning ML and DL. Any suggestions will be really helpful!

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The M4 is better than the M2 pro obviously, but the MacBook pro is definitely overall better than the MacBook air. But at this point the M2 pro chip is 3 years old and software updates will end after another 2-3 years. So I wouldn’t recommend buying this if you plan on keeping it for more than 4-5 years.

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Hey thanks a lot for your suggestion, and yes am planning to keep the mac for around 2-4 years, But i saw many people say m4 air throttles in deep learning tasks and prolonged backend tasks, because it has no fans, that is the main reason i cant really decide which one to go for…

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I would go for the M4 macbook air

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Hey thanks for the suggestion, just one question have you used a macbook air for the mentioned tasks? If yes can you kindly share your experience? Thanks a lot in advanced!

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Yes, this is absolutely true, the M4 chip throttles in the MacBook air thanks to no fans in it. But the M2 pro is still not recommend as the GPU in the M2 pro is not better than the base M4 even though the M2 pro has more physical cores than the M4. I am actually a student learning AI what kind of tasks are you thinking to do ? I have one friend who has the M4 MacBook air, but for the work he does it’s perfect for him, he doesn’t do lot of local AI training, at most he does is inferencing llms. Most of his AI training is done on cloud.

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I see, thanks a lot for the insight!
I locally run llms only for fine tuning tasks, for RAG models and other projects i mostly use colab

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I see, then I suppose the the M2 pro is better suited for your task. Fine tuning models locally is a GPU heavy and memory bandwidth heavy task. The M4 has better CPU performance but it lacks in the area of memory bandwidth. The M2 pro has 200 GB/sec whereas the M4 has 120 GB/sec. Although if you can find a model with the M2 pro with 24 GB ram then that would be better as 16 GB is bare minimum and you will use the laptop for 4 years so, more ram the merrier

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Got it! thanks a lot!!