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For the first time in my life, I'm in the market for a personal MBP. I had to get my ancient MBP for work replaced last week and they sent me one of the new 14" M2 Pro models and I absolutely love it. As I spent more time with it, I decided I think I want a piece of the new MBP line.

During the course of my initial belaboring of the options (primarily: 14 vs 16, M2 Pro vs Max) and the fact that I'm a manchild who doesn't want to wait 3 weeks for a more customized build, I've kind of landed on the default configurations for the M2 Max in both 14 and 16 inch - this would allow me to simply pay for the thing online with my Apple card, get my monthly installments, and just leave the house and go push through the throngs of people at the Apple store to pick it up near instantly. I popped by an Apple store y esterday just to get some face-to-face time with a 16 inch to decide if I could stomach the size.

I have an old ThinkPad X1 Big Dong Xtreme Edition or whatever ridiculous marketing name it had and that thing is 17" and a bit too... I dont know. It feels like a lunch tray in the lap and it could heat a 2k sq. ft. house when it really gets going. If I had used it extensively (I didn't) the heat probably would have sterilized me and cooked my legs with enough time.

But that doesn't mean I'm 200% AGAINST a 16" MBP, just that a 14" would be somewhat preferable. The concerns I'm seeing about overheating and throttling of an M2 Max in the 14" form factor are somewhat concerning, but as I dig deeper, there seem to be two camps here. One who says they will NEVER buy a laptop where there is ANY compromise involved (which is frankly kind of silly) and they go on to really bash the 14" heating/throttling issue, and another - seemingly more sensible - camp that states that overheating and throttling is something that the vast majority of even professional users likely won't experience often - if at all. They say that the benchmarks being run are putting excessive, incredible load on these chips that will rarely - if ever - be seen in anything but the most absolutely demanding use cases... which I understand is how benchmarks often work.

For the record, my intended uses for the laptop will be primarily writing code (mostly Python, maybe some Golang) and music production, primarily in FL Studio (post v20, where they added support for Apple Silicon - VSTs I like to use might be another issue here entirely in that regard, but I'm emotionally prepared for that fight).

So what's the deal? Should I say "fuck it" and spring for the 16" with the Max chip? Or does the 14" sound fine for my uses/are the complaints totally overblown?

EDIT: I think I'm calling it here. The 14" Max model I'm looking at is $3099. If I was to take the Pro build and bump it to 32GB RAM, the price difference becomes only $200 - a difference I can stomach for the convenience of getting it as soon as I drag my lazy ass out of the chair and drive to the Apple store for same-day pickup. Everyone's feedback is HIGHLY appreciated.

I'm in a place a lot of people get trapped in: lost in 4 or 8 bar loop hell.

Whether I'm sampling or arranging chords and melodies purely with synths, I'm generally able to come up with really catchy loops but I nearly always hit a wall face first when it comes to expanding on what I've created.

The laziest approach to this (and one I kind of default to) is to just keep adding elements to the original loop (add some hats after a while, add another synth playing an arpeggio off to the right with the gain low, etc) , but this just leaves me with a really heavily dressed up version of the loop by the end - at its core, it's just the same exact melody for 32 or 64 bars or whatever with a bunch of crap that's been slowly tacked on over time.

Alternately, I'll remove elements or remove the drums for a few bars... these things can be nice and are certainly very useful techniques for general variation, but they don't tackle the core problem: creating actual melodic variation in what I'm working on.

Interested in hearing your tips and tricks for switching up melodies.

Don't forget the 3 digit security code!

She'll be 5 months old tomorrow. Came home with us from the shelter nearly 2 months ago after only one visit. She pretty quickly decided she needs to sit in a chair in our home office since my fiancee and I both sit in chairs. As soon as she figured out that chewing on the arms of this chair is bad, she got it back permanently. It's her chair now.

EDIT: I have no idea why the image is forcing the 90 degree turn. Tried reuploading after forcing EXIF data and it didn't help. She's pretty cute at any angle, though, admittedly.