I don't use Lightroom and have moved from Adobe to Affinity, but my wife is in a similar boat to you, as she uses Lightroom extensively. Not an easy decision given our inability to upgrade either SSD or RAM post-purchase.It may be worth waiting to see what the lie of the land is in 2021. If I was buying now I personally would still get the 1TB SSD first, with an internal debate about whether to also add the extra RAM to 24GB, so in that sense my own priorities would be SSD first, then RAM if I could afford it. The ram upgrade from 8 to 16GB was a bit of a no-brainer, as early adopters on the M1 Mac Mini with only 8GB were reporting memory problems. So when buying the Mac Mini it was an easy decision to make regarding upgrading to the 1TB SSD. That was still OK performance-wise, but probably not quite as good as it could have been with the catalog folder on the internal SSD.

In that configuration I found that having my LrC catalog (with previews) on the internal SSD put a bit too much pressure on the 512GB, so I ended up putting the catalog folder on an external SSD. Prior to the M1 Mac Mini I had a 2013 MacBook Pro with 16GB ram but only the 512GB SSD. Ian will probably have his own opinion, but in my view it really depends on how you tend to use the internal SSD. On the otherhand LrD is now much more frugal with how much memory the GPU takes for itself. My personal experience with three M1 Macs (Mac mini M1 8-core CPU and GPU, 16GB memory, 1TB SSD, MacBook Pro M1 Pro 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 32GB memory, 2TB SSD, Mac M1 Ultra 20-core CPU, 48-core GPU, 64GB memory, 1TB SSD) is that LrC will use every byte of memory available and then some to support the GPU.

The takeaway from above is that Apple don't make the decision making process easy, especially when customers try to factor in what's best approach to future proofing. It's also worth noting that 512GB SSD on M2 Mac mini is using only one SSD chip, which has been found to be slower than the same size of SSD on M1 based systems, which use two 256GB SSD paired as RAID 0.

For an extra $100 the OP could get the base Mac Studio M1 Max (10-core CPU, 24-core GPU, 32GB memory and 512GB SSD). So, the price for M2 Pro plus 1TB SSD would be $1899.

I don't disagree, but I try to avoid spending other peoples moneyįor example, 32GB is only available if the OP steps up to the base M2 Pro version (10-core CPU and 16-core GPU).

M1 lightroom