What should I upgrade on the new Mac Studio, UM or Storage?

[Starfinity]

So my job is purchasing a new machine for me next month and I've been looking into what to get. We use Apple products and even before they announced the new Studio at WWDC a few days ago I knew I was going to be getting a Mac Studio. I'm gonna max out the new M2 Ultra chip and (due to budget constraints) do a one tier upgrade of either the Unified Memory to 128GB or the Storage to 2TB. I work in video production and the main applications I use are Premiere and After Effects. Suggestions on what I should go with?

 

[temende]

Storage is fairly straightforward to expand later with external drives, whereas RAM is basically impossible to change because it's tightly packaged with the SoC. So generally I would recommend prioritizing RAM upgrades.

 

[N9JIG]

Figure out how much RAM you NEED, multiply that by at least 2 and get that. Then see how much you have left in the budget and buy as much on-board storage as you can. Like "temende" said above, it is easy (and cheaper) to add additional external storage, especially for a desktop system like the Studio.

I splurged for the extra storage space on my MBP last year as it is less elegant to do so externally, I had anticipated using it mobile much more than I ended up doing. Had I known I would have save the thousand dollars and got the 1TB SSD rather than the 4 I got and offloaded my files to an external drive.

I ay be replacing my desktop solution with a Studio soon and my plans are 64GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage, it should be more than enough for me.

 

[Velin]

Unified RAM. No question.

 

[Feek]

Upgrade the RAM, you can always increase storage later externally, you can't increase the amount of memory.

 

[Shazaam!]

It's obviously true that you can expand storage externally but the fact remains that Apple's internal storage is screaming fast compared to even the fastest external alternatives. Go 2TB minimum.