I've had the M4 Max MacBook Pro for about two weeks now. I do not care about Geekbench scores. I wanted to see what changed in my work when the machine stopped being the bottleneck.
First thing I did was clone Topo Contábil. 42 NestJS modules across a monorepo. On my old machine, a cold start with full compilation took about 90 seconds. On the M4 Max, it takes 23. That changes the wait from "I'll check my phone while it compiles" to "oh, it's done."
Docker builds also got much faster. Multi-stage builds for our production images went from 4+ minutes to under 70 seconds. I rebuilt everything three times to confirm the number. With 48 GB, Docker isn't fighting for RAM anymore. I gave it 24GB and the system didn't even flinch.
I also ran our entire test suite, 42 modules, all specs in parallel, while Docker was building in another terminal. The fan spun up to maybe a whisper. On my Intel MacBook Pro the fans would have been loud and the machine would have started to thermal throttle.
Claude Code runs through the API, so the model itself is no faster. What changed is the commands it runs locally while it works: tsc, tests, builds. Those finish quickly now, so each round of edit, check and fix is shorter.
With compilation out of the way, I started noticing bottlenecks I had never seen, which surprised me. Network latency to our staging environment. Slow database seeds. That one integration test that takes 8 seconds because it actually hits an external API.
The 40-core GPU is overkill for development. I don't train models locally. But having 48 GB of unified memory means I can run our entire infrastructure stack in Docker, have 30 browser tabs open in Arc, run VS Code and a JetBrains IDE simultaneously, and still have headroom.
I also didn't expect it to change my workflow. I used to batch tasks because context switching had a compile-time cost. Now I jump between modules freely. I run tests more often because the feedback loop is near instant. I experiment more because rebuilding is cheap.
If you write code for a living and you are on anything older than M2, I think it is worth the price. It removes friction I had stopped noticing.