I think the 24 core M1 Max would be of greatest interest to folks who don’t care about GPU performance at all, like developers or others with CPU constrained workloads, but who want 64GB or RAM.
There might be someone out there who just want the extra encode/decode hardware of the M1 Max, but anyone in the market for that would probably get at least some mileage out of the extra GPU cores.
Absolutely, it’s for people who don’t care about the GPU.
I’m a software developer and I personally ordered a 24 core M1 Max for the memory bandwidth and multi-display support. I’ll take all the CPU they can offer but, for me, there’s zero ROI in further GPU upgrades.
Video editors, CAD designers, etc. would probably want all the GPU cores.
If I was giving someone advice on upgrading these machines, it would be “If you aren’t sure you need it [CPU/GPU cores, memory bandwidth], you probably don’t”.
In the end I felt that if I went to Max I would have to get 64GB to justify it, as I am not an intensive GPU user (or at least I am patient when photo editing). Having read that unified RAM in the M1 chips is like old RAM on steroids I figured 32Gb would be a good jump from 24Gb on my late 2014 iMac 27. So I saved some money and went for M1 32Gb 2Tb SSD.
You did the right thing for longevity lovers everywhere.