Lightroom Classic: Macbook Pro M1

Thanks for all the help I've received. I know that 256gb is tight, I have never intended to store or keep any photos on it and have an external SSD that I will use for that. Although I had been looking into the new M1 machines, my wife surprised with the one I now have the other day as a xmas and anniversary present.

*iangAdobe only specifies minimum RAM and no DISK size minimum for RUNNING Lightroom  I don’t think Adobe has issued any specific specs for the M1 Chip.  If you had asked for recommendations here or in a user led Lightroom support group, No one would have recommended a 256GB SSD. 

8gb ram and 256 ssd, I read reviews and everyone seem to say it would be fine, getting rather peed off now

What spec is your M1? Most owners we've had contact with have found them good, with exception of one who had the 8GB version - Memory seems to make quite a difference (all the others are 16GB), as does free disk space.

@cletus_lee I have no intention of just using the 256GB disk. I bought this M1 Mini for play and it will be replaced as my editing system with an M2 + lots of disk. I have well over a TB of photos on SSD (on my PC) and about 1/2 TB of video. Photos & video will likely move to a NAS and the catalog will stay local.

My point is an 8GB system can do an impressive job with Lightroom and it is because of the difference in how the M1 handles memory and just about everything else. I.e., to answer the OP, "it works".

And even PS (nothing fancy) and Davinci Resolve, even have had all 3 open at once. Each of those would benefit from more memory. Where LR on 8GB really suffers is with combining multiple images (e.g., panoramas from 30 x 46GB frames). And I can likely crash Davinci on export of a 4k video.

Sorry, Activity Monitor on MacOS.

Process monitor? I’ll have to check I’m on the M1 version. I’m starting to lean towards doing a whole new clean install of everything, although it seems to be settling down now

Lightroom and many apps use working storage.   The means that you will need sufficient free space on the Primary SSD. 100 GB is recommended. After the OS is installed, this does not leave room for much data and other apps.   I contend that 256 GB SSD is inadequate for running Lightroom CLassic.  On an M1 machine the OS uses storage differently and I think this is why 16 GB of RAM is the current max.

*iang clean install, then I moved my presets, installed Nik Collection (free version), some publishing services and created a new catalog to play around. I am slowly moving from a PC to a Mac - this won't be the final machine. GPU is on full. Make sure you are running the Apple (M1) build, not the Intel build. This is shown as "Kind" in the Process Monitor.

Jeff, did you do a clean install or copy data over from your previous machine? Also do you run with GPU acceleration switched on?