Need advice for my new macbook

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Good morning, I need some guidance as I am planning to upgrade my laptop but I’m not sure which computer is more optimal for gaming.

I currently play on a 2014 Macbook Pro with 8gb ram with intel core i5 2 core xd so clearly any new machine will be a huge upgrade but I’d like to choose well.

I am considering any of the newer Macs with M2 chip (Macbook Air or Pro) the question is regarding the specifications. Clearly 16GB of RAM in either of the two to be able to play the new expansion without a problem.

  • How important is the SSD? Does it affect the performance of the game in any way?

The base model of the mac includes only 256 gb and increasing it to 512 supposes a considerable price increase, but I don’t know how necessary it would be since WoW is the only game I play and the rest of the memory I use for photos and documents that don’t take up a lot of space.

One of my main concerns regarding the SSD is that the 256gb model only includes 1 chip, while the 512 model has 2 256 chips, and from what I understand, having 2 chips increases the speed a lot but I have no idea if this affects the game or is it only relevant for people who export heavy videos and that sort of thing.

  • How relevant is the fan playing on Mac?

The Macbook Air doesn’t come with a fan unlike the Pro, but it’s cheaper and i could use the extra money to bump up the SSD or RAM even more. I’ve seen videos of people playing without problems on the Air but I don’t know how detrimental it would be in the long run to the battery to play without a fan.

The configurations that i can afford are these:

  • Macbook Pro 13’ M2 - 16gb RAM, 8 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, 256 SSD with fan

  • Macbook Air 13’ M2 - 16gb RAM, 8/8 cores CPU and GPU, 512 SSD fanless

Finally, I must say that I don’t really do heavy content like raids or mythics that require a lot from the machine, I mainly dedicate to farming mounts from old raids, or open world missions, nothing too demanding. I play an average of 4-5 hours a day depending on the case xd.

I hope some expert in this type of thing can guide me a bit

Thank you very much in advance :slight_smile:

EDIT: i wanna know why my post keeps getting deleted, it’s not spam or repeated, i’ve checked other similar posts and none have the same situation as me. Please dont delete it im looking for advise t.t

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I dont know how hot M2 runs but m1 max can run 90C with fans on full blast, i bet the air would throttle without fans.
but in same token 256 is entirely too small, you need plenty for documents, OS, and wow alone needs like 100GB for itself plus plenty of free space for patching.

Like, you kind of need the pro, with fan, but still 512 SSD

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I have a similar question, but about updating my Mac mini. I really don’t need to update it, but if I want to play Dragonflight it recommends a M1 Max, which is only available in the Mac Studio, which is $1400 more then the $1399 I already don’t have. lol

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I’d suggest purchasing the MacBook Pro with the 256GB SSD and only install your OS and Apps on it. Then purchase a 1-4 TB External SSD that is USB3.1/3.2 or ThunderBolt3/4 and save all your documents on there.

P.S. I hear the one thing you can upgrade is the SSD after you purchase it, if you do need more built-in space, but has to be done at an Apple Store.

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Lets’ not post rumors about any manor of upgradeability on the ARM Macs. At best you will be able to add external drives/ports, but in a nutshell, what you purchase is basically it, internally going forward.

The fact that they consistently increase the base system requirements with each new expansion tells you that the minimum specs are often considered the out-going specs. At the time this game was announced, the M2 chips were not yet released, so the M2 might be added to the recommended list.
Given the form factor of the M1 Max, it is unlikely that you will see it in any laptop configuration or iMac configuration.

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The problem with that is that alone means you can have literally like OS, and 1 large app and that’s it. wow alone can be 100GB and needs at least twice that in free space for patching. the OS itself can be equally as much. so you’re already over 256GB because also lets not forget 256 isn’t even size you actually get. formated space is more like 240 and on top of that SSDs also degrade in performance significantly if you don’t keep about 1/3rd of it free.

the short of it is, 256 is woefully inadaquate even if you don’t put any files on it besides system and apps.

I absolutely agree an external should be used, but internal def still needs to be 512 for any wow player who wants a smooth running system

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the M2 is far better than m1 in graphics performance so they say, it doesn’t quite reach M1 pro in benchmarks but it isn’t too far behind it either.

I think an M2 mini would be fine, altough in an ideal world an M2 pro mini would be more ideal. rumos are that the mini will have a pro variant (but not a max). that’d be the way to go there.

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check “Max Tech” on youtube, they compared the 256GB vs 512GB

the 256GB SSD speed is half due to only having 1 SSD storage chip, vs the 512GB having 2 so able to access both at the same time, hence 2x speed.

it might not impact gameplay much, but definitely loading speeds and swap file in case of low memory

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If you want gaming first then I would recommend a good quality Windows Laptop with like RTX 3060 or RX 6600. This will be more reliable and likely noticeably cheaper - vs M1 Pro/M2 Pro with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD (+ longer warranty/whatever).

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Avoid the 256 GB at all costs, resale value will be next to nothing in a couple of years. While Apple products usually keep a good value, 256 is already obsolete as it is (can’t believe Apple still sells it as a baseline). Yes 512+ is more expensive but it will pay itself back in resale value in the future.

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Worth noting.
unsure how hard wow will push it but considering my own results with m1 max can push it to 90C (without throttling) with two fans in a bigger chassis, and fact M1 does run hotter and the 13 int macbook pro has a single fan design…I would guess that the m2 will probably throttle playing games that put heavy load on gpu cores. my recommendation goes from buy to “wait and see these get tested in games”

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Thank you all so much for your advice. After giving it a lot of thought i was going for the M2 16RAM with 512ssd but since the reviews are not looking good i think i’m going to wait till it’s been tested with WoW.
Who knows, maybe in a few months everything will be optimized and solved but right now… we’ll have to wait and see.

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Just an update: Ifixit did a teardown. Now we can see just why the M2 Air overheats so bloody easily: it’s got jack all for a heat spreader.

I’d honestly avoid the M2 entirely until Apple puts in better cooling. What’s the point of getting all the extra power when a game is going to cause it to thermally throttle on either model?

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I figured air would be worse than the 1 fan macbook pro.

Really have to see what they do for pro max and ultra and extreme.

it’s a fine chip, if they actually build a proper machine with it. The base units just aren’t it.

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I’ve read that the RF shield with the graphite tape on it is the heatspreader.

Anyway, it’s a machine designed for taking places, replying to e-mails, and typing notes on. Thermal throttling is just one way to segment markets.

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I currently have WoW running on my other monitor with a Macbook Air M2, I have the 10 core GPU, 2TB drive, and 24GB of memory. I can run it on graphics quality 4 with the textures bumped up to high.

This is NOT a machine just for “emails and taking notes”, that’s ridiculous and not reflected at all in what the machine can actually do. Please do not believe this. If the throttling was so bad (it’s not) then why can I maintain such a high frame rate even playing for more than an hour and a half?

It gets warm but to be honest not much more than my old Macbook Pro did and it has fans in it. I can play for hours and maintain a high frame rate, including busy times in LFR and dungeons.

It will be interesting to see if Blizzard for WoW adopts the new Metal 3 in macOS Ventura which will certainly help out.

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Because you’re not actually pushing it that hard. They absolutely throttle when pushed. But a 4 on high is barely pushing hard graphics settings. I bet I could throttle it pushing 120hz on graphics setting of 10 in ardenweald. Even throttled though it’s not gonna drop to 1fps, believe it or not most users don’t even notice throttling. fps will dip to like 40-60 (down from 120) when it happens in spots they know it can do more.
It is more than emails and facebook though, the M2 is a decently powerful chip, the statement in question is more in regards to how apple treats it. If it’s not a pro machine from their lineup, they aren’t worrying about how well it performs in final cut pro with every cpu/gpu core maxed out. They are trying to sell you a mac studio for that. When it comes to apple design, M2 a beast or not, the chasis and cooling is designed around general use, not pro.

As for metal 3, people often have misconceptions that apps are still using the old metal if they don’t target the new metal. When Metal 2 came out it was same thing. People were like “blizzard needs to upgrade from metal 1”. This is not like switching from opengl to metal or directx11 to 12.

Apps target metal, not “metal x”…if you’re on latest OS, you’re on latest metal…The only thing that changes with new metal versions is feature set (extensions/api calls). So if an app has a use for one of the new extensions they can implement usage of that specific api in their app. whether any of the new v3 apis are useful to wow I don’t recall. They were mostly ones added for feature parity with how far metal is behind vulkan and directx12 (since apple has been slacking really hard). metal 3 should enable more apps using vulkan and directx 12 to get ported.

What metal 3 does for existing app is probably just bug fixes (and new bugs) and hopefully speed improvements from latest drivers/optimizations. even if not using the latest extensions. Again, that won’t require blizzard to do anything though, metal is metal.

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