But if Adobe gets around to upgrading Lightroom Classic and Photoshop to take better advantage of more CPU and GPU cores in more parts of the applications, the M1 Max and M1 Ultra might become more practical for photography. I really think the M1 Pro base 14' and base 16' configurations, with enough unified memory, are the sweet spot for photographers. Keep in mind that Lightroom Classic uses the GPU in the Develop module only, so that limits the benefits of the models with more GPU cores. But in those Macs, the memory system does hit the SSD much more often to create larger virtual memory swap files. If your budget only lets you get as far as 16GB RAM, that’s probably not a disaster, because of how well the older M1 Macs perform with 8GB unified memory. I think that depending on budget, 32GB to 64GB is a good place to be. The reason I chose 32GB unified memory is because Lightroom Classic works better if it has at least 12GB for itself, and after adding what macOS wants, and how much memory you want the GPU to be able to take from unified memory, 16GB seemed a little tight, especially if you then want to open another application such as Photoshop. Lightroom Classic and Photoshop run smoothly, and the most telling thing is that compared to my previous Mac, a quad-core i5 MacBook Pro, with the M1 Pro the responsiveness of the Spot Removal tool is getting close to reasonable! Latest reported support status of Apple MacBook Pro M1 performance in Adobe Lightroom Classic part 2: import, HDR, panorama, power on Apple Silicon and. I wasn’t aiming for the most powerful, but the best balance between cost, performance, and portability.

I use the lowest base CPU (8-core) 14' M1 Pro with 32GB RAM, and I am very happy with this choice. You might want to look at the similar, longer discussion already in progress on this forum:

Macbook pro m1 lightroom