32g M5, 24g M5 Pro, or 48g M5 Pro?

After a lot of research via Reddit, YouTube, and other places, as well as a couple posts of my own… I have been able to better refine what I think I may need my from my next device and would like some opinions.

Some background: I am struggling with a 8gb ram, 256gb SSD windows laptop that is about 8 years old. I’m generally just sick of windows OS and would like to move over to Mac, which I’ve been considering for a while (iPhone and iPad user).

I am between three M5 MBP configurations:

1. Base M5 with bump to 32gb RAM ($2100)
2. M5 pro with 24gb RAM ($2200)
3. M5 pro with 48gb RAM ($2600)

Current uses:

1. Excel - personal projects. I’m a weirdo who sometimes models for fun
2. High res photo work (mostly Lightroom, occasional photoshop) both for pleasure and for some side income
3. Many browser tabs
4. Some combination of the above together

Planned/aspirational uses (put off largely due to hardware limitations):

1. AI tools in excel (e.g., Claude)
2. High res video work
3. Blu ray ripping

To add a little more flavor to the above:

1 - Excel via Windows VM:

My excel use right now is just a few personal things. However, I have about a decade of windows keyboard navigation ingrained in my brain, and I live in excel in my 9-5 (I work in finance).

While I can probably adjust to Mac excel navigation for my personal stuff, I have aspirations for 1) training myself up on AI tools in excel (don’t wanna be reliant on my employer to train) and 2) spinning up some side businesses that would be excel-dependent.

If I ended up in a situation where I’m doing a lot of heavy excel work, I would almost certainly rather use a virtual machine (parallels or similar) to use the windows version of excel. I don’t mind the efficiency loss of losing windows keyboard navigation for minor personal stuff, but for the two scenarios above I’d like to be at “full strength.”

As silly as it may sound, excel is my biggest concern with MacOS.

2 - Video and photo editing:

Honestly, I’ve grown used to some lag and clunkiness in my photo editing workflow on my current device, but I’d rather not need to accept that.

However, I would like to start doing some video work as well, which I’ve held off on cause I simply know my device would struggle. So I want to be able to do that easily.

3- Blu ray ripping:

I’m starting to build back up my physical media collection and want to have a digital server eventually as well.

Overall Thoughts

If it weren’t for the excel component, this would be something of a no brainer to me. I’d just go with the M5 pro with 24gb of RAM. But the potential use of a VM / parallels has me worried.

Now, it’s not as if I expect to be doing 4k video editing on MacOS while running a massive excel model on Windows at the same time, but I can certainly see a situation where I have a less complex excel workbook or three up while I’m doing some editing. That makes me think I need more ram, and maybe less of a focus on the CPU and GPU.

I know it might sound silly to some, but a seamless excel experience is genuinely my biggest concern in moving to MacOS. It seems a lot of people (understandably) don’t quite know how ingrained keytips and keyboard navigation ends up being when you live in excel.

The tricky part is a lot of this is aspirational use cases, so I can’t exactly trial run my current workflow and see if it works. There is a world where I decide against running excel in windows, and I feel a little silly contemplating a $3000 after tax computer without knowing for certain that I’m going to need all that power. But I also feel a little silly spending $2500 on a computer and not being able to use excel (one of my bare bones use cases) in the way I prefer.

Obviously, I have a track record of keeping a computer for a long time. So my knee jerk reaction is to “future proof” but technology seems to advance so fast I’m not sure if that concept even exists like it once did. The RAM shortage also has me thinking just go bigger. Either way, this is more money I’ve ever spent on a computer (though it’s been 8+ years since I was even looking).

With all this in mind, what makes the most sense?