I have the air and the pro. The air is plenty fast but can be difficult when you have large RAM consumption use cases such as doing front end workloads. It also can have some visual lag if you’re plugging into a larger monitor.
The pro, though very fast, can also hang when leaving too many apps open. But I did leave way too much running. It feels blazingly fast.
You should really think about that workloads you will use in the day to day. And also consider if you’re docking it. If you are, the pro is a much safer bet and the screen brightness and size is less relevant.
So the tldr is that the 64Gb of ram is the big differentiation. The other is plugging monitors into the pro.
Anecdata but I haven't seen any display lag from the Air M1. 4k + internal display on the 8GB works fine. 4k + internal + iPad Sidecar works fine on the 16GB.
I'm also doing FE workloads, 8GB is nearly there but the swap is still fast. I still have some swap usage on the 16GB but mostly because of Chrome tabs rather than workloads.
I have a bug that when I'm using sidecar (and I think sometimes my hotkey remapper triggers it too, somehow) that causes the window server to just spiral up to a whole CPU core and like 4GB of ram... if I restart the process, all is good until the machine sleeps, or a display reconnects.
The pro, though very fast, can also hang when leaving too many apps open. But I did leave way too much running. It feels blazingly fast.
You should really think about that workloads you will use in the day to day. And also consider if you’re docking it. If you are, the pro is a much safer bet and the screen brightness and size is less relevant.
So the tldr is that the 64Gb of ram is the big differentiation. The other is plugging monitors into the pro.