[Darryl Ramm]

And some more comments esp. since you are considering returning the MacBook Pro...

The current models of MBP are pretty nice, (some new models may be announced at WWDC soon) and what I'd do is play with Pro Tools 2022.5 (make sure you have the .5 release installed). You can do that by setting the playback engine to "built-in output" or "speakers" or whatever it's called on your system.

That way you can play around with Pro Tools and see how it runs on your Mac with some of your existing sessions. Check out any third party plugin compatibility issues etc.

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I'll also add my general advice on any new Mac... you should max out the size of the internal SSD as much as you can afford and ideally you can run sessions and samples off that internal super-fast NVMe SSD. You do not have to have separate external drives. That can help make your system more reliable (no external drives to fail or accidentally bump/unplug) and more transportable.

And I don't know what config system you upgraded from but the minimum memory required for modern Pro Tools is 16GB, I'd personally not buy a system with less than 32GB (my system actually has 64GB) to allow for future software bloat/new capabilities. There is some incorrect folklore out there that Apple Silicon macs need less memory than Intel systems.

If your system has a small internal SSD or say 16GB memory, you might want to think about leveraging returning it anyhow for an upgrade now or in future when you have other stuff sorted out.