Can anyone in the Steinberg team describe how much of an impact the higher specs of these new MacBook Pros might have on Dorico 4? (Or Dorico 5?! 
)
I guess you will only get a quite vague answer if you donāt include the system you want to compare it to. 
They (the 12-core ones) are about 25% faster than the M1 Pros for multi-core tasks, and 10% faster for single-core tasks.
So youāll likely see some improvement between those two numbers.
Theyāre faster than a 16-core Xeon 2019 Mac Pro, if thatās a useful comparison!
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Youāre right - it was a bit vague but I was inferring a comparison to the previous top-specās macbooks
We havenāt used them, so we have no first-hand knowledge, Iām afraid. We do not in any case maintain standard benchmarks for Dorico on any particular hardware.
I personally think the main takeaway is that anything original āM1ā or higher is a significant leap forward as far as Macs are concerned. I have an M1 mini (the original) with 16gb ram and Iāve never been able to make it sweat, and this includes video editing and multi-track recordings in StudioOne Pro with a myriad of advanced plugins. As Ben pointed out, these machines are equivalent to the large mac pros of only 2-3 years ago, so if youād have been contented with one of those machines (we all drooled over them at the time) then thereās no reason to not be pleased as punch with the newer M1/M2 class of machines.
Itās not just the CPU: the GPU is a significant step up, too. My 2018 Mini with the Intel integrated graphics ramps up the fans when I plug it into my 5K display; but the base M2 chips can edit 5 streams of 8K video at once!
A decade or more ago, you would have needed a top-of-the-range Mac Pro for all kinds of tasks that can now be done effortlessly by the entry-level model. Crazy times.
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It really is wild. I have a decked out intel/5k imac at home that I only bought a year or two ago. Technically the m1 class of machines had been released, but I needed 96gb ram (to the skeptics: yes, I use it for a special virtual instrument) and the Mac studio hadnāt been released yet (and, as it happens, I wouldnāt have been able to afford the spec I would have had to purchase due to the ram issue anyway).
There are legitimately times when I think to myself, āIāll wait and do XXX at workā on my little m1 mini. Video editing being a prime example. This is funny, because my imac is a beast of a machine in its own right, but the m1 architecture just makes certain tasks so effortless.
Have you actually tried using Hauptwerk on an M-series Mac with much less RAM than required? It would be interesting to know what happens.
Also, I donāt think audio samples are going to keep getting bigger and bigger anymore. We canāt be far away from NotePerformer 4, and smaller data sets using AI modelling is going to be the norm.
I use smaller sample sets on my mini all the time, and on a windows machine that is also 16gb. There are plenty of samples that fit in reasonable amounts of ram. Itās just the really big/fun stuff that pushes the limits.