It depends what do you intend to do and what camera system do you have.
I used to have baby MacBookPro with integrated GPU…it was not bad for my old 20+MPx Canon 5D.2 … then, I bought 50+MPx Canon 5Ds and that was hell.
I have sold my baby MBP and bought the real MBP beast with almost the best tech back in 2017. 4GB VRAM, 16GB RAM, quad core i9…well, if you travel a lot you may survive the hell
I have recently purchased a new PC on Win/AMD platform:
for comparison my MBP 17" processed 1600x 50MPx images in 7 hours but it is mostly due thermal throttling in laptops.
my new Ryzen killer does same job in less than 3 hours
What I noticed though, 50MPx loaded in PL3, easily eats 6GB of VRAM. MBP had just 4GB VRAM and it was noticable in loading previews
Otherwise, loading times and applying adjustment didn’t changed much between two generations of HW.
I gave up Mac because for price of “trashcan” one can buy two hardcore Windows computers with double processing power. iMacs are good for web browsing and some easy jobs if you have patience.
- I would suggest you GPU with at least 6GB of VRAM or more if you have high MPx camera
- NVM/SSD disk with lots of IOPs…my MBP 2017 had impressive 1GBs speeds with enough IOPs for anything
- if you intend to do lots of images at once (I do timelapse where 500 images is pretty much slow weekend), invest in as much cores as possible. AMD Ryzen 9 3900X has got 12 cores and you can run 5 images parallel in PL3
- 16GB RAM is very much the minimum…PL3 processing above by mentioned images used (inclusive Win OS) 15GB RAM
As much as I like stability of FreeBSD/MacOS, it is not intended for real work unless you are extremly rich and can afford 6000€ “trashcan”. Retina LCDs were revolution but nothing special if you have ever used CAD/CAM/DTP displays.
My Ryzen killer cost 3000€ and same power on Mac will cost you double. Not to mention…next year, I can trash GPU and CPU and do easy 1000€ upgrade for double power. That is something you cannot do on modern Apple producst too much
I recall my first MBP 2011 laptop where one could still swap RAM, SSD, GPU but those times are long gone in name of miniaturisation and Apple strategy to kill powerusers with changing own non Apple components.
It is really down to what you intend to do on your PC.