eatstoomuchjam

The above is exactly why I say there are asterisks and "it depends" in the answer.
Will either computer be able to play back 12K braw in Resolve without dropping frames?  As long as the storage is fast enough, absolutely.  Will it be able to play back in Premiere without dropping frames?  🤷‍♂️ FCP? 🤷‍♂️
As I said before, my M2 Max (the weaker version) w/ 64GB is just able to play back 8K raw from my R5 in Resolve.  If I put on a grade where I tweak a few raw options, add FilmConvert Nitrate, and tweak some curves/color warper stuff afterward, I still get 23.98 on it as long as I'm not doing anything else in the background.  Canon raw is a nightmare codec in terms of performance.  Braw is easier.
One other thing to consider is that I'm sure that the local Apple store (if there is one) has some M3 Max models on the showroom floor.  If you're nice about it, they might be willing to at least put FCP on one (or let you download Resolve) to load a sample project file and some footage.  Since the UM12K has been out for a long time, I'm sure some nice reviewer/youtuber has put some raw files online for you to download.  You could just give it a try with one of your sample grades to understand if it performs as needed.

It would be great to be able to give a straight answer, but there are too many variables.
Even something like the SSD option of the Mac model chosen might mean that it can or cannot do something.
Going to Resolve, there are literally dozens of variables involved.  Even if it's just 12K footage on a 4K timeline with a LUT - will Resolve be using Linear or Tetrahedral interpolation for the LUT?  This matters as it's extra processing power required, etc.

Further to what @eatstoomuchjam said, I think there are only three types of performance:
it can't play ungraded footage realtime (ie, you can't edit with it) it can play footage realtime but can't do it with a heavy grade (ie, you can do some colour grading realtime) it can play footage realtime with a heavy grade (ie, it's reliable and you can colour grade live in front of a client) The spec required for level 2 should be researchable and BM would have made this pretty efficient I would imagine.  The spec for level 3 is a "how long is a piece of string" question, depending on a ton of variables including timeline resolution and only you can answer it, but if you're going to be doing lots of heavy things like NR and spatial treatments on a 4K timeline then you're probably well into Ultra / Studio territory.

There are a lot of asterisks and "it depends" in any answer to that, but overall, I'd say that if you're spending $4k on a MBP (which updating from the base RAM and SSD would do), if you plan to edit 12k, it might be worth the extra $300 to jump to the bigger chip.  It partly depends on how many effects/how much noise reduction, etc.  I'd also say that if you're like most people, if you're gonna spend $4k on a laptop, you're going to want it to last for a while.  You might factor that in too.
Speaking for myself, I bought the lower of the M2 Max chips in my MBP and it's just barely enough to handle 8k Canon raw in Resolve and once I add noise reduction to the clips that need it, export times get pretty slow (like 40 minutes for a 15 minute short).  Would having the system be 30% faster help a lot?  Not really.  30 minutes to export the clips wouldn't be life changing.
You might also consider whether M4 is coming soon - M2 was released in June 2022 and M3 in October 2023.  If the M4 is coming, it'll probably have about a 10-15% speed boost over M3 - that or you might be able to get a nice deal on an M3 at that time.  Depends on when you're planning to start shooting 12k, I suppose.  😁

Further to this, I watched a few past videos from Blaine yesterday and this video (while quite chaotic) gives a bunch of pretty interesting examples of how using a Film Emulation of some kind combined with some of the basic Resolve tools can give quick but very effective results:
Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is the way he treats Resolve..  he shows that if you know a few techniques then you can get in, make some good adjustments, get a great result, and get out, and move on with your day.
It's sort of a rare counter-example of the impression that Resolve is finicky and takes hours and hours, which almost all other colour grading videos give, but isn't true.
At it's most basic, you can just apply a LUT to every clip and then make basic adjustments in a node prior to the LUT on each clip and can get great results in a really quick way.  This is the way that film-makers grade when they want a result, rather than the way that colour grading YouTubers grade when they're making a YT video about some nuance or other.
The section from 5:00 on with the test shots shows that even if the shots weren't filmed well at all, you can get great results quickly with just a few quick techniques.

Cullen Kelly says that the grain and the halation are nicer than the previous separate OFX plugins, so that's promising if you're a connoisseur / picky 🙂 
 
 

My guess is that the difference in actual user experience of a system receiving a 923 and one receiving 893 will be negligible.  Between the two, I'd choose the one where I get a better deal.

If you're in the PC world, you're definitely better off editing on desktop vs laptop if you're working with high-res footage or doing effects, etc.  Most laptops throttle down a lot when not plugged in and (in my experience) make a jet engine noise when dealing with a prolonged load on CPU/GPU.  And as ac6000cw says, the mobile GPU's are almost always lesser versions of their desktop counterparts.  Also when on battery, life tends to be very short because CPU/GPU pull a lot of power.
My M2 Max, on the other hand, can handle 8k Canon raw acceptably - and I got the weaker variant of it.  Performance is almost the same whether plugged in or on battery.  Fans do ramp up when working it hard (now that I've added denoising to most of the scenes that need it, the 14-minute short I'm currently working on/grading definitely has the fans running full blast when I run an export).  
Basically, in absolute performance numbers a high-end PC desktop will beat any Mac currently on the market and at a fraction of the cost of a Mac Studio ($3k for a decent Ryzen + RTX 4090!).  A top-of-the-line PC laptop plugged into the wall will also outperform the MBP in absolute numbers (except whoooooosh fan noise)...  but if you want to actually be mobile, the Mac is the hands-down winner.
 

For the most part, if somebody is looking at an Alienware prebuilt, they're probably not the target audience for BYOPC.
At that point, it's better to go with somebody like Maingear, NZXT, or Starforge - they all use off-the-shelf parts, but you'll also pay more for the same specs as you'll get in a prebuilt from one of the big players.  I'd be willing to bet that for a similar price to what you'd pay them for the above system, you'd be able to get a 14" MBP with M3 Max - and then you'd be able to edit on the go too.  😉

Without having shot 12K, I'll say that system looks like more than enough (and if it's not, there won't be many systems that are).  The RTX 4090 is the most powerful consumer GPU on the market and that's a really decent CPU.  It might even be overkill (though overkill also means you probably won't be shopping for a better system in 1-2 years).
If you aren't already familiar with PugetBench, Puget Systems have a nice database of results that people have achieved with various systems.
https://benchmarks.pugetsystems.com/benchmarks/

What's not clear on that is how expandable the system is - which was a problem with the Alienware that I had for a while.  There seems to be only one more slot for NVMe beyond the boot drive and the USB ports are only 3.2 and not 4.  The Alienware that I had only had a single free PCIe slot as well.  In my case, it was enough to add a 10g network card and that was about it.
If you want to put 12K footage locally on the machine, 2TB is going to get cramped fast.  Fast USB 3.2 storage will be able to keep up, though as of a year or so ago, flash-based USB 3.x storage arrays were not so common - at least at a reasonable price.
If it were me, I'd look for something with 2-3 additional NVMe slots beyond the boot drive to be able to add more local storage and I'd look for something with USB 4 since it will be compatible with most/all Thunderbolt devices which gives a lot of better/more interesting options for external storage/devices.

From the videos I've seen on Film Look Creator, I think subtractive saturation and split toning are the things that stuck at to me as most interesting - that and I'm going to need to spend a bit of time with their grain generator to see if I like the output.

One of the things I find hilarious about YouTube is that a lot of the big camera influencers talk about leveling up channels and increasing production value, etc.  A lot of the bigger names have between 50-200k subscribers and a lot of them had the advantage of being early to starting camera channels.  Newer, theoretically popular people like Cam Mackey have like 65k.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine decided to do something with his YouTube channel a couple of years ago after the news did a story about his having purchased the monorail for $1/car from our local zoo when they stopped running it and turning it into a private campsite on some land in Wisconsin.  He mostly repurposes junk that he finds at garage sales and thrift stores into things like push-pull carts on railroad tracks and satellite dishes coated in aluminum foil.  The cameras he uses are mostly potatoes - like 25-year old camcorders and Hero 3-type stuff.  He has a pretty decent natural grasp of editing and story, though, and he's a funny guy.  He also would freely admit that he neither knows a lot about cameras nor cares to know any more.  Last I checked, he was at about 187k subscribers (including me - I like watching his stuff).
So if the goal is just to grow a YouTube channel, the quality of the camera is probably the least important bit.  Making half of your video be slow motion slideshow garbage so that you can put "cinematic" in the title doesn't really get views if the rest of the content is garbage.
I buy too much gear for my own mediocre talent, but that's partly just because I want it and after a lot of years, I can almost always find something to trade in to make stuff more affordable.  I have no illusions that buying a Komodo-X will substantially improve anything I do, but I might do it anyway.  If I get it, I'll probably like it a lot for a while and then after a couple of years, I'll probably trade it in toward something else.
 
Anyway, another thing to remember with these YouTubers that are in the business of making day 1 review commercials for various channels - when they're showing "what this camera can do," go watch their older stuff with a camera from last year.  Most of the time, it looks almost exactly like whatever they're doing with the new camera because they're really not that different.  One of the most laughable things that people say on various camera forums or YT comments is "I can't wait for (creator name here) to get it so we can see what that camera can really do."  Wanna know what that camera will look at when your favorite creator gets it?  Go watch the review they did of the camera before it.  It'll look pretty much like that.

Slight digression from the topic, but unless you really need the flippy screen, you might consider the RX100 V over the ZV-1.  The V is even smaller, but weighs just a hair more (probably due to having more metal and less plastic in the body) (and I think the V is cheaper on the used market).  The flippy screen was just about the only difference between the two cameras.

My rule of thumb is that if I use an item on 5 or more shoots, buying (and reselling at the end) is cheaper than renting. That's probably fairly conservative too: I usually buy used, so when I sell I get 60-80% of the cost back. I've even sold cameras at a profit after 1-2 years.

There's a lot more to the question than just which lights to use.  If you're indoors and feel like you're fighting the sun and if the windows will be mostly out of focus in the background, you can just put ND gel over them - it's fairly cheap and fast.  If they'll be in focus, IMO ND gels look a little bit like shit so that might not be your best option.
If you're outdoors and fighting the sun, especially for close-ups, a collapsible reflector or two (or three if you have one which can give some negative fill) is often a lot better than trying to compete with the sun with your light.  You can get a pretty big reflector for about $30 from almost any photo store in the world.
Otherwise, short of going with really big lights, if you're trying to blast a light through a window and have it compete with the sun, it's going to have to be a pretty big light.  In those cases, I'd probably try to find a way to shoot the scene differently.  😄
These days my main kit consists of 1xAputure 600X, 1xAputure P300C, 1xAmaran 300C, 2xAmaran 150C - as well as the B7C lunchbox, MC4 mini-lunchbox, and a few scattered MX's.  It's more than enough for almost anything that I shoot.  I'll probably continue adding some stuff here and there when Aputure have huge sales (their Black Friday sale is legit - I got a huge discount on the 600X plus a couple of bonus things).  If I need to go bigger than that, I'm more likely to rent it or to just hire a gaffer to roll up with a box truck full of stuff.
For shooting on the go, I just also put together a kit with 3xStellaPro's with their Bowen mount - they're tiny and run off of USB-C so I can plug 'em into a V mount plate or even a battery bank.  Only disadvantage?  Above 30% or so, the fan runs constantly.  I'm excited to actually do a shoot with 'em.  I also picked up a Molus X100 for the cases where I want somebody to hand hold a light.  It's alright, but the reflector in the Bowens mount seems to do some funky things with my softboxes.
 

Absolutely.
Another consideration for some is availability.
When I was hanging around reduser.com it became pretty apparent that a common thing was to own a RED (obviously!) and also a set of vintage primes, but to rent modern lenses.  The rationale was that often these cinematographers were doing personal projects and having the vintage primes made it so that they had a set on hand for whenever the personal project was able to be scheduled.
Quite a few were filming one (or more!) documentaries too, and are essentially on-call so that if something suddenly happens they can grab the camera and go.  It was common for these guys to store the camera in a go-bag, often rigged up and sitting next to the front door.  Good luck shooting that if you got the call and then had to rent equipment in the middle of the night!!
Film-making varies much more person-to-person than most people expect, and logistical factors or aesthetic preferences can easily flip a decision between two different people and their circumstances.

The situation with review content being affected by commercial interests is nothing new in the slightest...
Many years ago I was asked if I was interested in doing a product review for a now long-gone print magazine. I tried to be as fair as possible when I wrote it, but thought the product had some usability/compatibility issues that needing fixing. The version of the review printed in the magazine had some of my criticism watered-down, I assume partly because advertising revenue related to the product was important to the finances of the magazine.
I only did a couple of reviews for the magazine in the end, mostly because the amount they paid for them wasn't much in relation the work involved in testing a product properly (and I wasn't interested in doing quicker, more superficial reviews).

LOL, yeah, or self-importance or narcissistic or megalomanianism etc 😂😂😂
I guess in that case they don't have a clear idea of the industry they're in, likely because they're thinking about themselves rather than their audience.
Entertainment is very broad and is sort-of a catch-all for the other categories, but I think it's still useful as it firmly defines that the purpose is to engage and entertain.  
I think that because YT was new and people didn't really understand what it was or how it fit into the world people weren't clear that it still fit the definitions that had been previously established, but (as usual) the pros had figured it out already and there (almost never) isn't anything new under the sun.

If you just want footage with no commentary, markr041 who is a user here has a YouTube channel and he tends to try a pretty decent number of the cameras that come out.  They're usually decently shot and I don't think I've ever even seen one where he talked about the camera (or even showed his face).  😃

One of the things I find hilarious about YouTube is that a lot of the big camera influencers talk about leveling up channels and increasing production value, etc.  A lot of the bigger names have between 50-200k subscribers and a lot of them had the advantage of being early to starting camera channels.  Newer, theoretically popular people like Cam Mackey have like 65k.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine decided to do something with his YouTube channel a couple of years ago after the news did a story about his having purchased the monorail for $1/car from our local zoo when they stopped running it and turning it into a private campsite on some land in Wisconsin.  He mostly repurposes junk that he finds at garage sales and thrift stores into things like push-pull carts on railroad tracks and satellite dishes coated in aluminum foil.  The cameras he uses are mostly potatoes - like 25-year old camcorders and Hero 3-type stuff.  He has a pretty decent natural grasp of editing and story, though, and he's a funny guy.  He also would freely admit that he neither knows a lot about cameras nor cares to know any more.  Last I checked, he was at about 187k subscribers (including me - I like watching his stuff).
So if the goal is just to grow a YouTube channel, the quality of the camera is probably the least important bit.  Making half of your video be slow motion slideshow garbage so that you can put "cinematic" in the title doesn't really get views if the rest of the content is garbage.
I buy too much gear for my own mediocre talent, but that's partly just because I want it and after a lot of years, I can almost always find something to trade in to make stuff more affordable.  I have no illusions that buying a Komodo-X will substantially improve anything I do, but I might do it anyway.  If I get it, I'll probably like it a lot for a while and then after a couple of years, I'll probably trade it in toward something else.
 
Anyway, another thing to remember with these YouTubers that are in the business of making day 1 review commercials for various channels - when they're showing "what this camera can do," go watch their older stuff with a camera from last year.  Most of the time, it looks almost exactly like whatever they're doing with the new camera because they're really not that different.  One of the most laughable things that people say on various camera forums or YT comments is "I can't wait for (creator name here) to get it so we can see what that camera can really do."  Wanna know what that camera will look at when your favorite creator gets it?  Go watch the review they did of the camera before it.  It'll look pretty much like that.

Self-indulgence?  😉 
 
Entertainment is probably an overly-broad category, but that's splitting hairs.

The majority of YT that I watch has nothing to do with cameras, and in general the people that have the most followers have the least fancy camera equipment.
I mean, there are probably more channels that have over 500K subscribers and are just shot with a smartphone than all the active camera YT channels combined.

Well I'm no pro, but I do want to get pro results.
The tiles were, happily, a fairly neutral dark grey, but the room itself was tiny. You literally could not swing a cat in there. I lit it quite easily - 1 x 5800K Lupo into a bounce on the wall opposite the talent, a 3200K Lupo offside and behind, a 3200K tube on the floor at his feet and then the M20 at 6300K behind him lighting the sloping roof at around 40% to give a bit of separation.
It certainly looked nice enough in the monitor! Today's shots (which only took just over an hour - the advantage of the tiny location was that you can only do so many CUs and mids of a guy sitting on a stool playing a guitar and staring at a laptop!)n will be used as B-roll to run as interview cutaways and also to create a monitor LUT for all the other studio work we'll be doing over the next couple of months.

One of the things I find hilarious about YouTube is that a lot of the big camera influencers talk about leveling up channels and increasing production value, etc.  A lot of the bigger names have between 50-200k subscribers and a lot of them had the advantage of being early to starting camera channels.  Newer, theoretically popular people like Cam Mackey have like 65k.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine decided to do something with his YouTube channel a couple of years ago after the news did a story about his having purchased the monorail for $1/car from our local zoo when they stopped running it and turning it into a private campsite on some land in Wisconsin.  He mostly repurposes junk that he finds at garage sales and thrift stores into things like push-pull carts on railroad tracks and satellite dishes coated in aluminum foil.  The cameras he uses are mostly potatoes - like 25-year old camcorders and Hero 3-type stuff.  He has a pretty decent natural grasp of editing and story, though, and he's a funny guy.  He also would freely admit that he neither knows a lot about cameras nor cares to know any more.  Last I checked, he was at about 187k subscribers (including me - I like watching his stuff).
So if the goal is just to grow a YouTube channel, the quality of the camera is probably the least important bit.  Making half of your video be slow motion slideshow garbage so that you can put "cinematic" in the title doesn't really get views if the rest of the content is garbage.
I buy too much gear for my own mediocre talent, but that's partly just because I want it and after a lot of years, I can almost always find something to trade in to make stuff more affordable.  I have no illusions that buying a Komodo-X will substantially improve anything I do, but I might do it anyway.  If I get it, I'll probably like it a lot for a while and then after a couple of years, I'll probably trade it in toward something else.
 
Anyway, another thing to remember with these YouTubers that are in the business of making day 1 review commercials for various channels - when they're showing "what this camera can do," go watch their older stuff with a camera from last year.  Most of the time, it looks almost exactly like whatever they're doing with the new camera because they're really not that different.  One of the most laughable things that people say on various camera forums or YT comments is "I can't wait for (creator name here) to get it so we can see what that camera can really do."  Wanna know what that camera will look at when your favorite creator gets it?  Go watch the review they did of the camera before it.  It'll look pretty much like that.

One of the things I find hilarious about YouTube is that a lot of the big camera influencers talk about leveling up channels and increasing production value, etc.  A lot of the bigger names have between 50-200k subscribers and a lot of them had the advantage of being early to starting camera channels.  Newer, theoretically popular people like Cam Mackey have like 65k.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine decided to do something with his YouTube channel a couple of years ago after the news did a story about his having purchased the monorail for $1/car from our local zoo when they stopped running it and turning it into a private campsite on some land in Wisconsin.  He mostly repurposes junk that he finds at garage sales and thrift stores into things like push-pull carts on railroad tracks and satellite dishes coated in aluminum foil.  The cameras he uses are mostly potatoes - like 25-year old camcorders and Hero 3-type stuff.  He has a pretty decent natural grasp of editing and story, though, and he's a funny guy.  He also would freely admit that he neither knows a lot about cameras nor cares to know any more.  Last I checked, he was at about 187k subscribers (including me - I like watching his stuff).
So if the goal is just to grow a YouTube channel, the quality of the camera is probably the least important bit.  Making half of your video be slow motion slideshow garbage so that you can put "cinematic" in the title doesn't really get views if the rest of the content is garbage.
I buy too much gear for my own mediocre talent, but that's partly just because I want it and after a lot of years, I can almost always find something to trade in to make stuff more affordable.  I have no illusions that buying a Komodo-X will substantially improve anything I do, but I might do it anyway.  If I get it, I'll probably like it a lot for a while and then after a couple of years, I'll probably trade it in toward something else.
 
Anyway, another thing to remember with these YouTubers that are in the business of making day 1 review commercials for various channels - when they're showing "what this camera can do," go watch their older stuff with a camera from last year.  Most of the time, it looks almost exactly like whatever they're doing with the new camera because they're really not that different.  One of the most laughable things that people say on various camera forums or YT comments is "I can't wait for (creator name here) to get it so we can see what that camera can really do."  Wanna know what that camera will look at when your favorite creator gets it?  Go watch the review they did of the camera before it.  It'll look pretty much like that.