yeah! So much of this is just tech anxiety. Apple has also not helped by making things more confusing then ever for people to choose what is right for them. How many variations are available with all the different cores. I find even the branding bizarre now, you buy an MacBook Pro M3 Pro... can we get "pro" in there a few more times?
I am happy with the variety but I am floored at just how bad most reviewers are at good, particularly long term, comparisons. Contrast the superficial reviews (max SSD write speed in Black Magic, lol! As if that mattered....) we see in so many reviews (at most, going back to M2, some M1, but it's a patchwork) compared to the art that is a Toms Hardware review, or an AnandTech or ArsTechnica review from their hayday. It's not even close. That's why I think there's so much confusion on where people should spend their money. For instance, I think most people getting >16GB (edit: 18GB) for nonprofessional use are wasting that $180; they should instead put it into more cores or a sooner update/upgrade cycle.
I miss BareFeats. It was very small, but, for what he had, he had very good reviews. Tiny, but actionable.
In particular, I can't imagine why someone would buy a base M3 and upgrade all the way to 24GB. They have sufficient apps that they need >16/18GB, but those apps don't need the better cores, memory bandwidth, and GPU of the Pro lineup? What? And then we get to my frustration with Apple and the iMac CPU limitations...
As an example, from TH,
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html. Yes, gaming centric, but mountains of data, sufficient that most could extract their use case from the details and get actionable data.
