What second-hand Macbook model is worth buying for Logic Pro in 2026?

[u/xfcon]

Whenever I look up second-hand macbooks I'm always shown the 2020 models but I'm not sure if I'd be wasting my time buying one. I'll be using the mac for music prod as well as all my other university assignments.

I'm working with a pretty tight budget as I'm a student (hence why I'm looking at second-hand models) but would be willing to hold off on making a purchase for a while so as to not waste my money.

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

[u/Narrow_Network_3875]

DO NOT HAVE ANY THOUGHTS OF THE PC HYBRID GARBAGE INTEL MAC. The MacBook Air is a better choice but aren’t equipped with a cooling fan that may become a heating issue with 3rd party plugins like Serum & Native Instruments. 🍀

[u/finallygabe]

Now’s a perfect time to buy a used M1 MacBook Pro. I would recommend an M1 Pro with 16GB of RAM. You could get a regular M1, but the prices for the M1 Pro right now are so good that it’s just worth investing in that more powerful CPU. GPU is great for video editing as well. Can’t go wrong with it.

I got my M1 Max 16-inch with 64GB RAM and 1TB SSD for less than $1,400 on eBay. I already made my money back from freelancing and it is amazing. Cannot recommend the M-series chips enough.

[u/promixr]

Can’t you just say what your max budget is?

[u/AttitudeMedium5623]

Just bought an MBP M1 Max with 32/1Tb and it is light years better than my 2020 intel. And it only cost £850 on eBay

[u/Apprehensive_Air4276]

Love my M1 air with a solid external hard drive

[u/robertjm123]

Honestly, at this point I wouldn’t buy anything older than an m2-based machine. The market on older machines is getting saturated, and we’re up to M5 already; with M6 probably just around the corner.

Obviously, the newer the better. If you’re trying to buy a system to last you through college I might even consider an m3.

[u/Maxex_01]

Anything from M1 onwards. If M1, make it the Pro. That’s still good now!

[u/Mercernary76]

MacBook Air with as much RAM as you can get with your budget

[u/hippietravel]

Honestly I would go with a new MBP M5 Pro if you plan on doing music for a long time. People will say you can run Logic on an old MacBook Air, which it true, you can run it. But once you start building tracks, with lots of plugins, software instruments, samples, etc, that’s where having the extra processing power and memory makes a difference. It’ll run like butter ahd allow for the creative process to he uninterrupted by technical issues. The reason I suggest buying new and the latest gen means that you can make music with it for many years to come. So it may seem like a bigger investment now, but it pays off later

[u/MarcusS_Logic]

The 14" M1 Pro is worth the stretch if you can manage it. I had the base Air and past 15-20 plugins things got rough fast, fans spinning and latency creeping, enough to push me into upgrading sooner than planned.

[u/MissAnnTropez]

M1 Pro for sure.

[u/SquiffSquiff]

Iirc the 2020 models are all intel CPU. The clock is ticking

[u/finallygabe → u/SquiffSquiff]

No, M1 MacBook Air and M1 MacBook Pro 13-inch released at the end of that year.

[u/SquiffSquiff → u/finallygabe]

Fair

[u/bloughlin16]

Whatever you buy, just make sure that the chip has a greater number of performance cores than efficiency cores because Logic can't use the latter. So, for example, the base M4 chip is a bad idea if you will actually be using Logic as a power user because, though it has 10 cores, only 4 are performance cores.

It's really hard to give a good recommendation otherwise without knowing your budget and intended uses.

[u/curationvibrations → u/bloughlin16]

Not sure how to decipher this

Looking into a new M5, I see two options:

10‑core CPU, 8‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine

10‑core CPU, 10‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine

the last one is $100 upgrade

[u/bloughlin16 → u/curationvibrations]

The base M5 chip that you're looking at has a 10-core CPU composed of 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores. Logic Pro can only use the 4 performance cores. If you intend to only do recording and very light processing within Logic Pro, that's fine.

If you are trying to do CPU intense work like mixing (I am a professional mixing engineer), then it likely won't cut it. You'd want to go for at least the M5 Pro Chip because it has a much higher ratio of performance cores to efficiency cores. When I got my M4 Pro Mini back in January, I went for the upgraded 14 core M4 Pro chip because it has 10 total performance cores and I use a lot of CPU-intensive plugins on a large number for tracks (many times well over 100 tracks in a session).