M1 Air 16gb? Or M1 Pro 8gb?

It would probably help if you're more specifically about the uses of the laptop.

Performance and longevity wise the fact that the pro doesn't constantly throttle down 30% whenever it gets hot will probably give the system more long-term usability than eight extra gigs of RAM. Plus you get an extra GPU core out of the pro and 512 gigs storage, better speakers and mics, more screen brightness, more battery and that touch bar thing.

I think unless you're looking for the lightest, sexiest, most ergonomic design the Pro is a better investment. It's quite a bit more performance potential and storage for the about same price as 8 gigs of extra RAM that will probably be utilized far less than the added CPU performance. 30% performance difference when you need the most it is probably a bigger deal then all the other differences combined.

I think over the course of five plus years you'll definitely wind up benefiting more from the lack of CPU's throttling due to the active cooling of the MacBook pro versus the passive cooling of the Air or the slightly lower weight or the wedge shape.

So I think you should narrow it down to the ability of the pro to not throttle performance on extended uses vs the the thinner, slightly lighter and fanless design. I do consider the lack of a fan to fail and constantly suck dust through the system to be a somewhat significant advantage though maybe not one that most people care about.

Seems like the most common use case for the extra RAM would be for running games since it's unified memory shared by the graphics chip, but If you're running games it's hard to see how the pro wouldn't be the better choice with more hard drive space, more GPU power, and that pretty huge difference in CPU throttling.

/r/macbook Thread