Upgrade to MacBook fo using Lightroom?

12-Core CPU, 16-Core GPU, 24GB Unified Memory

By @rafel_lrm

That one is fine for general Lightroom Classic use, and should work well for several years. It is much better for Lightroom Classic than the base model (10-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB Unified Memory).

14-Core CPU, 20-Core GPU, 24GB Unified Memory

By @rafel_lrm

That one might be a few percent faster, but probably not enough to justify spending the extra money over the first option. To get a more noticeable performance improvement would require an expensive upgrade to the M4 Max level, which doubles the GPU cores but doesn’t add much to the CPU.

In short:

More CPU cores help general responsiveness and preview generation.

More GPU cores help all GPU-accelerated features (Develop module, Export, all AI features especially Denoise). But much of Lightroom Classic is still not GPU-accelerated.

…decide to upgrade the memory to 48gb for the apps to run smoothly…

By @rafel_lrm

24GB is good, much better than 16GB. Getting more Unified Memory than that is typically about how many other apps you want to run at the same time. I usually run multiple apps simultaneously (Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, web browser, email…) so I like 32GB of Unified Memory. 48GB and above is usually only worth it for those editing very large images (over maybe 36 megapixels), including large images with many layers in Photoshop, and maybe if you regularly do very large panorama merges in Lightroom Classic or Photoshop where several images must be held in memory. Or if you run other memory-hungry apps like for 3D modeling, visual effects, or virtual machines.