[sigmoid10]

If someone's primary use case is heavy media editing, I wouldn't recommend an Air in the first place. It has its uses for casual people and coders who primarily work in the cloud, but let's not pretend that it is a high end business level laptop.

[pavlov]

I use a 2023 MacBook Air with 24GB memory, and I can’t tell the difference to a MacBook Pro.

Integrated memory on Apple Silicon has made the trade-offs much simpler to understand because there’s no separate GPU and VRAM to think about. The performance difference between Air and Pro models is so small, it’s irrelevant for practically anything.

[sigmoid10]

I have used both. Air and Pro. For working remotely in the cloud on ML, nothing beats the Air. For nearly everything that runs locally and goes above light coding (e.g. modern web dev with endless node modules), the Pro is significantly better.

[aidanlister]

We have bought 200+ macbook pro’s over the years, but when the M3 air came out we started rolling that out to everyone including developers and it has been a huge success. I would only recommend Pro’s for heavy media editing applications right now. We don’t do any AI/ML stuff yet so not sure how that will change the landscape.

[sigmoid10]

I use an Air for ML. It's perfect if you work in the cloud. Locally it's too much hassle. Not just because of the limited power, but because of lack of support for MPS in recent kernels in modern frameworks.