Best MacBook Pro for LrC/PS

[kentmcpherson]

I need to replace my 2019 Intel based MacBook Pro with a new most likely M2 based MacBook Pro.  What has been the experience here for users of the Apple based CPUs and RAM needed?  Do I need an M2 Max or is the Pro enough? 16GB of RAM on my Intel based MacBook is not enough.  My laptop is slow slow slow.  My old 2015 iMac with 32GB of RAM ran LrC/PS better.  Is 16GB on the Apple CPU architecture better than Intel?  Do I really need 32GB?  Any feedback on real experience is appreciated.  

[TheDigitalDog]

More integrated RAM than M1 vs M2 and the most powerful GPU as possible.

I went with 64GB on my MBP:

MBP Pro 16" 2022 32-Core GPU | 16-Core Neural Engine/64GB

It's mighty fast for me.

[Conrad C]

A lot of it depends on the sizes of images you edit, and the types of jobs you do. If you mostly edit a few phone pics for the web at a time, 16GB on an M1 is probably enough. If you edit large shoots from a high megapixel camera (like 24 megapixels and up), want to use AI masks and other new AI features, and export many photos at a time, 32GB would be better. If you typically take those photos into Photoshop and add many layers, and keep several applications open at a time (Lightroom Classic plus Photoshop plus your web browser plus a video editor plus a 3D application…) 32GB is definitely better and you can consider maybe an M2 Pro with 64GB of unified memory.

My computer is an M1 Pro MacBook Pro with 32GB unified memory. Best laptop I’ve ever owned, handles everything I throw at it, hardly ever feels slow, rarely gets hot or noisy. Maybe I could have spent more on 64GB memory, but that has not seemed necessary. This computer has been a workhorse for almost 2 years already and will definitely last a few years more.

Is 16GB on the Apple CPU architecture better than Intel?

By @kentmcpherson

It should be. When the M1 came out, many people noticed that an M1 with 8GB unified memory could do more work noticeably better than an Intel Mac with 8GB RAM. 16GB on Apple Silicon is still a lot better than 8GB for today’s workloads, but with software demanding more of the GPU and graphics memory, and Lightroom Classic using more memory than before, 32GB seems like a safe middle ground for a Mac you want to use for 4 to 6 years. It is more difficult to justify the expense of 64GB.

As for your Intel MacBook feeling slow, that is probably more about Intel vs Apple Silicon than memory or anything else. For example, the new very intensive AI Denoise feature in Lightroom Classic takes seconds per image on an M1/M2, but it takes minutes per image on an Intel Mac.

[Ian Lyons]

The various videos comparing M1/M2, Pro/Max and 32/64GB at https://www.youtube.com/c/ArtIsRight/videos provide a more comprehensive explantion of the benefits than we can do on the forum.