@Heenaaah
My first Apple Silicon based MacBook Pro was the 16-inch M1 Max 32GB/1TB. My second? The 16-inch M4 Max 128GB/4TB. The first MacBook Pro was to test how well Adobe applications run on Apple Silicon - which, simply, put, is fantastic. The second MacBook Pro was to switch over to more serious work (my primary workstation is still a desktop). My prior MacBook Pro was the 2013 15-inch Retinal MacBook Pro 16GB/750GB (close to the max configuration at the time) and I was very much in the habit of starting projects on that MacBook Pro and finishing them on a 2013 Mac Pro.
You might try with something similar to what I did with your first Apple Silicon based MacBook Pro. Go with 48GB/1TB to see how it works for you while keeping an upgrade in mind. If you go with the 14-inch model, you should get the same performance that you would get from the 16-inch.
The main reason I went with more RAM the second time around is that professionally I'm used to working with 128GB to 192GB of RAM to have After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro among other apps all open at the same time. The main reason I went with more storage is that I feel 2TB is really the minimum to have your OS, applications, Photoshop Scratch Disk, After Effects Media Cache and now things like LucidLink pin location all someplace that's very, very, very fast and not having to constantly offload files All that said, I have a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro 16GB/512GB for email, web-based project management, and Slack. Every once and a while I open After Effects or Photoshop and they run really well there. While it wouldn't be my first choice (once you've gotten used to the XDR display of the 16-inch and 14-inch MacBook Pros for optimized HDR work - it's hard to look at anything else), I'm not sure there's a wrong option across the Apple Silicon based Macs.
What may also be worth mentionting is that I first purchased the 16-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro (I think it was 24GB/512GB) because that's all Costco had in stock at the time. A few weeks later, they got the M1 Pro Max instock so I quickly exchanged the Pro. For the breif time I had the Pro model, the performance was great, but I never go the change to really test it.
- Warren
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