Lightroom Classic - Seeking Apple Mac Studio Configuration Advice

PS

I have decided to get 4T internal SSD storage since it gives me enough room to store at least one trip’s photos and edit them, then move the edited photos to external NAS Drives.

By @berkeleyhomes.com - Ira Serkes

The upgrade to 4TB of internal storage costs an eye-popping $1200. If the extra storage is only for editing the current set of photos before moving them to an NAS, and you have any interest at all in saving money, my opinion is the 4TB isn’t necessary. To save hundreds of dollars, I would get 1TB of internal storage (maybe 2TB if it can be justified), and for the working space for current photos attach one 4TB external SSD for less than $300 at the Black Friday prices that are starting to appear. I would be OK with the 4TB Crucial X10 SSD at the $230 sale price I just looked at.

Is the X10 the fastest? No, SSDs in that class can do around 1000MB/sec over USB 3 on a Mac, much slower than a (far more expensive) 6000+MB/sec Thunderbolt 5 external SSD or the even faster Mac internal storage (7000+MB/sec). But for source image files like read-only camera raw files, it’s more than fast enough. I already store my photos on something similar, and it’s still much faster than accessing originals over an NAS.

The very fast and expensive internal storage of a Mac Studio is best used for files where performance is critical. For Lightroom Classic, that would mean the Camera Raw cache, and maybe the previews. Although there’s technically no problem with using larger amounts of internal storage for occasionally accessed static media files like raw photos, it’s an expensive way to do it.

The base Mac Studio should be fine. But there are some considerations to think about below that might change that, related to your other question:

I really don’t know how CPU, GPU and unified memory affect editing speed.

By @berkeleyhomes.com - Ira Serkes

The way you balance those depends on what kind of editing you do. If you mostly work on one photo or a small set of photos in a session, and you mostly adjust tone and color and you only occasionally use advanced AI features, you can just get the base Mac Studio and you’ll probably be happy. The specs of that base Mac Studio will run Lightroom Classic better than most other Macs that Apple sells. The discussion below might help you decide if you need the more expensive Mac Studio based on the Ultra-class processor.

CPU. This is widely used in Lightroom Classic. However, it’s unlikely you’ll benefit from the additional CPU cores in the Ultra Mac Studio unless you are always batch-processing large numbers of photos. 

GPU. This is becoming much more important for Lightroom Classic compared to the past. Today, GPU performance determines the speed of the latest AI features such as Adaptive Color, reflection removal, generative Remove, Lens Blur, AI masks like people and object detection, and especially Denoise. If you process large batches of images, a more powerful GPU can noticeably shorten the time to render previews and exported files. If you use those features daily on many images, the many additional GPU cores in the Ultra-based Mac Studio will save time.

Unified Memory. The 32GB on the base Mac Studio is great, my MacBook Pro runs Lightroom Classic very well on 32GB. On a Mac, the GPU gets its graphics memory from the shared Unified Memory which is a problem on Macs with 16GB or less, but again, the Mac Studio starts at 32GB so it should not be short on graphics memory. The reasons to get a memory upgrade are to run more applications or virtual machines at the same time as Lightroom Classic, or to edit larger files like panoramas stitched from lots of images. (In my opinion 24GB is a good amount and 16GB is the minimum.)

In short, the main reason for a Lightroom Classic user to upgrade to the Ultra-based Mac Studio is to get many more GPU cores to run AI features faster (especially Denoise) and get maximum GPU acceleration for previews and exports. The other specs can be covered by the Max-based Mac Studio.