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As I mentioned at the beginning, any M-series Mac can edit any video. While that is a true statement, there are still things we can do to optimize our system.
Increasingly, visual effects and rendering are shifting from the CPU to the GPU, so more GPU cores are better. However, no video editor needs an Ultra chip. (You may want one, you may be able to afford one, you may want the bragging rights... but you don't need it.) The Ultra chip is designed for other tasks, such as AI modeling, 3D rendering, programming, medical image processing and so on.
When it comes to RAM and internal storage, no NLE uses more than 64 GB of RAM, and most are quite happy with 32 GB. The sweet spot for internal storage is 1-2 TB. Because media is SO data intensive, you are far better off buying external SSD storage. First this saves a boatload of money, second, Thunderbolt transfers data faster than your NLE can process it so you don't need the extreme speed of the internal SSD, and, third external storage is easy to expand.
Whether you need a laptop or a desktop is dependent upon the jobs you do. While I own a laptop, I find myself wedded to desktop systems with their much larger screens. The performance differences between laptop and desktop for video editing are minimal.
I keep mentioning performance. The reason I don't obsess - too much - about getting the absolute fastest system is that my time is not spent waiting on my computer. My time is spent on my computer waiting on me to decide which shot is next, where I need to trim it, whether a music cue hits in the right place. In other words, my computer is waiting on me to think.
No chip in the world can speed that up.
Finally, here's a real-world example to help decrease your stress when thinking about new gear. Most of what I create are short-form videos. As a test, I exported a finished 13-minute multi-cam interview. It took 94 seconds. If I did the same export on a M6, which is 47% faster, the export would be 26 seconds faster. Clearly, this saves time. But is a 68-second export, compared to a 94-second export, enough to buy new gear?
If you are running on Intel, you need to upgrade. But if you are running on last year's gear, then don't worry, you are doing just fine.
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