I’d say M2 Pro 16/512 should be sufficient and good value if you find one. 32 would be better (as Jerry said, less swapping, that also means longer lifespan of the SSD). Pro for the fan, like Jerry said. 16” rather than 14”.  M2 Max or the newer M3 versions, more RAM, bigger SSD … all welcome of course, depending on the budget. I use the 16” Pro M2 Max 32/1 with C1 and the machine stays fast, cool and quiet no matter what. External 40Gbps NVMe enclosures are a thing. 

Cassie's Knees...

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Some sky objects are seasonal, only appearing as signs of spring or summer or fall or winter. Others, depending on your location are circumpolar, meaning they are visible year round, never dropping below the horizon or drifting out of view. Cassiopeia is circumpolar for many folks in the Northern Hemisphere. It also has a lot of neat clusters and nebulae. It is fairly easy to find, even in light polluted areas, it is the “W” shaped constellation, not far away from the Big Dipper. This, just under 12 minutes equivalent exposure, is the region around Cassie’s knees. There are several Messier Objects here as well as the bright star Gamma Cassiopeia nicknamed ‘Navi’ by the astronaut Virgil Ivan “Gus” Grissom. The famous Perseid meteor showers come from this constellation’s region.  https://www.constellation-guide.com/constellation-list/cassiopeia-constellation/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_Cassiopeiae Screen capture using Stellarium: http://stellarium.org/  

Get as much ram as you can afford. It seems just about all of the manufacturers are soldering the ram onto the motherboard these days instead of giving you slots and letting you make the choice later. sigh. If you going with a MacBook, there is not much difference between the M2 and M3 cpu versions, (some seconds of processing speed-up instead of many minutes). The ram amount still matters a whole lot, things slowdown once the ram gets used up and the working files are subsequently swapped back and forth to the hard drive. There is a rumored M4 version that will be out any day now, 😀. An underrated factor is the fan, as to whether or not it has one, the Air version does not have one, the Pro version does have one. When you start messing with large files, the computer generates a lot of heat, so if it lacks a fan, it will slow things down to keep from cooking itself to death. (The ones with fans will also slow things down after a while if the heat does not dissipate fast enough.) How much slowdown depends on what you are doing. Best wishes.

If you can play the entire clips back in your camera, they are not lost. Well, as long as there are no future accidents. Try the card reader approach discussed in the postings above H. Smith’s. You will need to pull the separate files over to your computer and use a movie editor to stitch them back into a being a single file. Oh yeah, make backups. p.s. Welcome to the forum.

I'll venture a guess here that the other flash units you tried have their own battery power. Fujifilm cameras compatible with the EF-X8 have an extra pin to supply power to the flash, as the EF-X8 does not carry its own power onboard. It sounds to me that something is wrong in the power supply circuit of either the body or the flash. If I remember correctly, EF-X8 compatible bodies have a pin to the top left of the hot shoe through which the body and flash communicate. I would also need to review the settings manual, because I don't know if it is possible through settings to de-energize that pin. Did B&H explore these avenues? I would be surprised if they didn't. I would expect that if anyone could run down the problem, it would be B&H. To summarize, my off-the-cuff guesses range from a dirty communication pin to a circuit failure to that pin, or a menu setting de-activating that pin. I will review my info and post an update if I find anything. For five years now, I use an EF-X8 for daytime close range TTL, but mainly as a commander to manage arrays of off-camera flash units, and so far the EF-X8 is 100% bulletproof.