When the M series laptops came out I thought that it made sense to be economical with memory, but LLM's became huge a few years after release and Apple Silicon

When the M series laptops came out I thought that it made sense to be economical with memory, but LLM's became huge a few years after release and Apple Silicon happens to be local inferencing beasts that can use all the memory you can throw at it. At release I would have said most people should stick with as little memory as they could get away with due to Apple's pricing and the non-upgradability. Nowadays, I'd either recommend the M3 or M3 Pro and keeping things cheaper, but if you're going to get the Max at all, I sort of feel like you may as well go for the 16c cpu/40c GPU/128gb option at $1500 USD more and play around with stuff like Laama. It will become obsolete in not too long due to memory tech marching forwards, but it's still going to be plenty capable of dabbling with this stuff for awhile. The M3 Max has the memory bandwidth of a 4 dimm DDR5-6400 server which is pretty impressive given the pricing. Beyond that, I see people speccing high memory for things like VFX and Macs are pretty popular choices for those doing video work.