Apple CPU's and Indesign - what to choose?

[wonderings]

I am contemplating upgrading from my 13" MacBook Pro to a 14" MacBook Pro with Apples M1 Pro chip. in pricing it out it is confusing when it comes to the CPU.

The options I am looking at are:

Apple M1 Pro with 8-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
Apple M1 Pro with 10-core CPU, 14-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine

So the difference between the 2 is the number of cores. I don't know if it is worth a little more money for the 10 core and how Indesign will use the M1 Pro processor. Most of my work is done in Indesign so anything to speed that up is very welcome. Just not sure if a 2 core difference will make any noticeable improvements.

Would be getting 32 gigs of RAM and a 512gb SSD - opting for external for large storage.

Anyone have any experience with these new chips? Would eventually look at replacing my 5K iMac with this machine as I am at the end of the line in terms of OS updates (Big Sur), though not ready to jump fully into M1 for work as I do need some VM of Windows 10 still at the moment.

[Joe]

InDesign won't benefit from the extra cores on the CPU. Photoshop would if you do a lot of heavy work in Photoshop and maybe Illustrator would as well too. Not sure what the price difference is but it it isn't a lot it may help to have more cores in the future.

[wonderings]

InDesign won't benefit from the extra cores on the CPU. Photoshop would if you do a lot of heavy work in Photoshop and maybe Illustrator would as well too. Not sure what the price difference is but it it isn't a lot it may help to have more cores in the future.

That is what I was thinking but these are new and not familiar with them at all. They are not even putting clock speed on them! When it comes to buy think I will just leave at the base level, they should all be an improvement over what I am using now despite it still being a great computer. Not a heavy user in Photoshop or Illustrator though I do use them regularly, it is light stuff.

[wonderings]

I did end up ordering a 14" MacBook Pro with M1 Max 10 core/24 core GPU with 32 gigs of ram and 1TB SSD. This will one day replace my i5 iMac at work as it no longer supports anything beyond Big Sur. Not in a rush to update though and not liking the loss of Windows VM, but that is the way things are going. A few months before I get the new machine, definitely curious to see how the Adobe apps run now that they are updated to natively run M1. My 5K iMac still runs amazing for what I do, love this machine.

[scottrsimons]

If you really need the VM on the iMac. Leave it up and running and remote into it from the new Mac and then access the VMs from there. That is how we have gotten around those sorts of issues in the past and currently for certain situations. Especially if the old iMac is still running strong.

[wonderings]

If you really need the VM on the iMac. Leave it up and running and remote into it from the new Mac and then access the VMs from there. That is how we have gotten around those sorts of issues in the past and currently for certain situations. Especially if the old iMac is still running strong.

We are running an ancient version of Apogee here, very bare bones use and IT is looking to remove eventually. When that happens the need for a Windows VM at work will be gone. Of course by that time I think they will have moved all of us to Windows computers as they want to phase out the Mac to simplify things for IT. Not something I am thrilled with as I prefer the Mac OS and am much more productive with it. I am fluent in both Windows and Mac.

For home use where I wanted to have a VM to run Fiery XF 6 client which is not 64 bit I was going to run XF client in a VM but have opted to just direct connect that Mac Mini that runs the server and screen share and use that as if it were a VM.