Help me configure a MBP for photography

[Singin Hobo]

I'll be replacing my Late-2013 MBP with a 14" M2

It won't be my primary computer but just something to kick-start my workflow during the day—mainly rating and cropping photos from volume photography in Lightroom to be finished in Photoshop on my iMac at home. Files I'm working with are about 50mb raw.

I want it to run smooth (obviously), but I have no idea how to interpret the multi-cores and all that and I don't want to spend an extra $2k if all of the bigger numbers are mainly for editing video and 3D coding.

Will the base model 14" 10-core CPU, 16-Core GPU, and 16GB Unified Memory be sufficient for editing 50mpx raw photos or would you recommend I bump anything up?

 

[Onimusha370]

That’s my spec, handles everything an absolute breeze - no need to spend any extra money, these machines are monsters. Going with the pro means you get longer battery life, and it’ll run completely silently.

 

[groundcontrol]

I'm a photographer still using a 2016 MBP. I aim to get 32GB ram for my new machine, as I feel it is one of the factors limiting my editing. I mostly work with 24MP files, occasionally larger. If I was regularly editing 50MP files I would especially want more RAM, but that is just me. Others who edit photos, and have the latest MBP, may have more informed insight and experience. Just sharing my thoughts and plan, FWIW.

 

[Beau10]

It's worthwhile watching this to see if it will impact your use case:

 

[Singin Hobo]

It's worthwhile watching this to see if it will impact your use case:

It was worthwhile watching that! Thanks for sharing and thanks the rest of you as well

 

[Adult80HD]

For what you describe ABSOLUTELY get 32GB of RAM. The no-brainer is to spend the extra $900 to get the Max CPU as that will get you the 32GB of RAM, more CPU and GPU cores and the doubled memory bandwidth. Those will make a big difference in performance and almost undoubtedly make you iMac at home feel slooowwww.

 

[Fishrrman]

"I'll be replacing my Late-2013 MBP with a 14" M2"

For still photography, I reckon the base model configuration would be "all you need" in terms of CPU and RAM.
Although you might want to bump up the storage from 512gb to 1tb...