M4 Max or M4 Pro

[psmith]

If you had to choose between the following - what would you choose:

M4 Max with 14 core CPU and 32 core GPU with 36GB ram  w/- 410GB/s memory bandwidth
M4 Pro with 14 core CPU and 20 core GPU with 48GB ram w/- 273GB/s memory bandwidth

Both are roughly the same price.  (its another $750 to get the Max with 48GB...

My current 5yr old PC laptop has 64GB Ram - it appears to be rarely all used.  It rarely pops over 50% - even with 4 archicad models open, one large revit file a dozen Chrome windows (that seem to take up the most RAM)...

Will the faster bandwidth and faster GPU be more useful  / better than the RAM?

My daily work is probably 30% archicad use using teamwork files that are >1G... large apartment buildings, complex houses and urban projects... don't do much twinmotion rendering... spend lots of time cutting 2d and 3d sections... viewing different parts of the model to check and make quick amendments.

Operating system used: Mac Apple Silicon

[Laszlo Nagy]

Memory in an Apple silicon cannot be compared apples-to-apples to memory in a pc because an Apple silicon is a SoC (System on a chip), meaning it is not only the CPU, but other components as well, like the GPU, memory, etc. So, the CPU, GPU, and memory are all on a single chip, and what is important is that the CPU and the GPU are using the same 36 GB or 48 GB of memory (it is called Unified Memory).

So, if you say you need 32 GB RAM for the CPU, and maybe another 8 GB for the GPU, that is already 40 GB. Plus, you would want to future-proof it so the memory is enough 3 or 4 years from now when you may still be using this machine and newer Apple macOS versions and applications need more memory for both the CPU and GPU.

In conclusion, I would go for more memory, in this case, the 48 GB.