I am looking at getting a Mac Studio and generally have two questions -
• M2 Max or M2 Ultra
• if M2 Ultra - 64Gb or 128Gb RAM
for Blender.
Can you even pick Max with 128? In my local market Max can only be specified up to 96 gigs. Its the Ultra that allows 128 and more. How about going for 60 core Ultra? Seems to be the sweet spot in terms of price/performance.
Ultimately, only you can know what would be enough of an upgrade for you. Look at your work and identify what is holding you back at the moment. One thing to note, since M2 shares the same pool of ram between CPU and GPU, ram consumption will be more than what you observe on your current MAC with a dedicated GPU.
Blender is quite memory efficiënt. If I’d only be running Blender, 32Gb might suffice on Mac.
But I often also run AE, illustrator, Audition at the same time, because I’m rountripping audio, comp and 3d. Sometimes even Affinity, Première for subs or Handbrake. I’m not saying I run all of them at once, but 4 big apps is not unusual. That’s when 64Gb right now starts to use swap. So I picked 128gB Ultra for the coming 5-6 years.
This being said, Apple SSD’s are very fast, so swap should mean less of a slowdown than in the past. I have 1.5Gb/sec SSD in the old iMac Pro, the studio offers read speeds up to 7.4GB/s. That’s sustained read, which is faster than random read. But still: it’s way faster than before!
Oh you’re right. M2 Max RAM upgrade is 96Gb. Sorry.
It’s hard to know what I would be enough of an upgrade at the moment especially in terms of rendering and sculpting as my system is slow in both, and often comes to a halt with sculpting, so it’s hard to get a feel for what I might need.
From what you’re saying about RAM and having many apps open at the same time, @psvedas’ suggestion of the 60 Core Ultra but with 64Gb RAM might be a good middle ground.
I am usually only focusing on detailed work in one app eg. many layers of a digital illustration, or modelling, not usually both. I might have Blender and Unity open while importing models but that isn’t too heavy.
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If you’re usually working in 1 app, 64 should be fine. Only “large content” could use more memory. I have a 8Gb M1 iPad Pro, where I can sculpt up to 3-4 million of poly’s in Nomad.
Keep in mind that Apple Silicon uses memory very differently to Intel Macs. Read: it needs less of it. My M1 Macbook has only 16Gb, but I opened Ae+AI+Bl at the same time there, without a noticeable slowdown. It’s just that you can’t upgrade it later on, which probably makes us all buy a little too much memory 
I think the minor issue with that is from my understanding the RAM is a shared resource, in other words its both system RAM and GPU RAM. Bit less of an issue if you aren’t doing Cycles renders, not that a Mac is really all that great for rendering anyway.
Having said that, outside of working on really large data sets, like say 4k+ resolution images with 100+ layers in Photoshop, then 64GB should be plenty for a while.
I’ve got the Mac Studio M1 Max with 32GB. I normally have about 15-20 apps open at the same time. Blender is working perfectly for me. I would choose 64GB a next time. Not because Blender needs more, but when I open large projects in other apps at the same time, occasionally I do notice I could do with more. But really, that’s just luxury. Any Mac with Apple Silicon is a major improvement over any Intel Mac, no matter how much memory. In other words, what ever you choose, you can’t really go wrong. Sell your Intel Mac as soon as you can, now there still is some demand for those.
No way, my old machine always becomes “the lab” when a new one arrives. It’s for testing, running a Wordpress server, doing some work while the main machine is rendering. When the main machine breaks, I sometimes use the previous one as a fallback. Only when Mac becomes so slow that it’s an email+web browsing machine, I donate it to charity.
I actually have two M3, one with 64 GB Ram and one with 24 GB. I only notice a difference in Blender when rendering GPU. Never had in another app. Even tested Octane. Oh, if I could I would use Octane, it’s so much better with displacement and shading. However the problem with Blender is, that you have a lot limitation in the shader editor and no preview, etc. It’s just the best GPU render on Mac currently.
Have to add, that displacement is a GPU killer in Blender, not only on Mac, it’s done so bad. And Octane&Redshift already use Nanite for it. Blender currently far behind.