Installation & update
About program installation and update, hardware, operating systems, setup, etc.

Apple MBP M2 MAX sucks.

Jimmy
Booster

my 2cents, hopefully this might save others time and money.

just bought a new mbp m2 max, it sucks, im returning it. 

It doens't come close to my alienware x17r2 (i7 with rtx 3080 ti)

3d modeling is just terrible, where I spend a lot of time.
I didn't buy this machine for rendering. 

 

27 REPLIES 27
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator

FWIW, My MacBook Pro M2 Max is a totally awesome machine... double the performance of my previous (dead) iMac Pro which was ridiculously powerful.  All functions are fast, fluid and I have yet to hear the fan go on.

 

@Jimmy I have to wonder if you had installed the Intel version of AC 26 by mistake, vs the Apple Siliicone/ARM version...along with all updates?  It should be vastly superior to the Alienware that you describe.

One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier   •   macOS Sequoia 15.2, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB
Jimmy
Booster

Hey Karl, 
no it was arm version. I was really hopeful it would work as I love the mbp portability. 

That is odd. All of our M series Mac’s way outperform our Intel based machines. We’re slowly upgrading everything. Most are just MacMini’s and they perform brilliantly. 

Lee Hankins
ArchiCAD 4.5 - Archicad 28 Apple Silicon 27.3 | 28 Apple Silicon
macOS Sequoia (15.1.1)

Just to check, you haven’t got any of the power saving features turned on have you when running on battery?

Lee Hankins
ArchiCAD 4.5 - Archicad 28 Apple Silicon 27.3 | 28 Apple Silicon
macOS Sequoia (15.1.1)

No, running full tilt.

Lee, are you comparing your apple systems to Intel Mac's, or windows systems ?

We’re fully Mac based. I’ve even got Archicad 26 running through Windows 11 through Parallels on my M1 Max MacBook Pro and it zooms. 

Lee Hankins
ArchiCAD 4.5 - Archicad 28 Apple Silicon 27.3 | 28 Apple Silicon
macOS Sequoia (15.1.1)
Unabend
Booster

I have the same problems as Jimmy. By now I'm desperate, even working on small files weighing less than 100Mb the performance of Archicad on a Macbook Pro M2Max with 64Gb of ram is ... simply sucks.

I'm ruined, I spent 5000€ on a very expensive toy.

See my previous post few days ago:

https://community.graphisoft.com/t5/Installation-update/Archicad-Macbook-M2Max-HUGE-performance-prob...

Eduardo Rolon
Moderator

Wasn't the problem in that post related to imported DWGs and wasn't it fixed?

Eduardo Rolón AIA NCARB
AC27 US/INT -> AC08

Macbook Pro M1 Max 64GB ram, OS X 10.XX latest
another Moderator

Hi Eduardo!

No, new file new project...

A simple little sloped terrain (mesh), some slabs on it, and few solid operations or change of materials... that Archicad execute in 20/30 seconds or more 😰

Why i've bought Mac?