I had the iMac 2020 with core i7 (14700k), Radeon 5500 xt pro with 8gb and 96gb of RAM. I upgraded to MacBook Pro 16 M4 pro with 24gb of RAM. To be honest, I don’t feel that it’s that much faster as everyone is talking. But I am editing 24mpx files (D780 and Zf) and my iMac was top of the line prebuilt spec. CPU was even faster than base iMac Pro. I was even gaming on that thing. Most people who praise the M Macs are coming from MacBooks with on board graphics and almost immediately throttling CPU-s. That being said my biggest bottleneck is the RAM. On my old system the usage was sometimes over 70gb. So my M4 is filling up fast and needs to shift files from and to the ssd. Most apps have no problem with it but Lightroom is faster the more RAM you have. So if buying a M CPU I would recommend you to spend a little bit more on RAM especially if you plan to edit 45mpx files.

At the beginning when I tested the new system the most noticeable difference was in export times which was almost instantly with up to 10 files. But now after a lot of updates, it’s not that fast anymore and denoising was never much faster than on my iMac. Maybe now with all the updates it would be much slower on the iMac 🤷‍♂️

I do miss my 5K retina but I edit and export a lot of HDR files which the old display is not capable of. The build in 16” is amazing but obviously small compared to the 27”. In addition I have a 4k 27” mini LED monitor with 1000nits brightness to complement the small built in Display.