I use my laptop for development (not machine learning work). The heaviest thing I run locally for dev is one or two node powered frontends at once.
I do not use it for any type of music/video editing. I run an external 4k monitor and have apps like VSCode, Slack, Safari, Chrome, and Notion open at the same time. I don't expect other people to have this exact workload, so all comments welcomed!
I'm curious if people are using the Air with success.
The next time I opened it, I was out of the country. The trackpad no longer worked. At all. Nothing worked to fix it. Apple support was only able to apologize and tell me to bring it in for repair the next time I am in the U.S.
I managed to use keyboard shortcuts to pair it with a Bluetooth mouse, so at least it’s not a brick. Anyway, I’m just annoyed and wanted to gripe.
So far, I’ve gotten Parallels running a Mac OS VM. That seems to run well although the laptop has kernel panicked once already.
I’d say you’d be fine with the Air, but only if you upgrade the RAM. If you have the money and plan to keep the machine a few years, the MBP is probably worth it.
As CIO of a 70 person company, we found that MBA M1s with 8GB were insufficient. People said they NEEDED the MBPs for performance, but I suspect they just liked the 16” MBPs for the screen real estate. Either way, they were largely unhappy with the stock MBAs and happy with stock MBP 16s.