If you have everything connected through a dock, it's just one cable to disconnect. The dock would charge the MBP at the same time. Even with a MBA M2, you'd probably have it plugged into power.
What is your justification of maxing the RAM on the MBA M2 instead of getting a more powerful 14" MBP M1?
Luckily there’s a $150 Back to school promo goin on now to offset that! 😁$180 for 8GB of RAM...oh, Apple...
My set up is rather complicated. I actually have an OWC Thunderbolt 4 dock connected to it AND the power cable along with an HDMI cable (one of my monitors is an LG 42" C2 TV, which for some reason can only do 4K30 through Thunderbolt, but can do 4K60 through HDMI). The dock doesn't supply enough power at only 60 watts so it loses power without at least a 96 watt power supply plugged in. I also have a 2.5Gbps ethernet dongle plugged in because my dock doesn't have an ethernet port. Even if it did, it probably wouldn't be 2.5Gbps.
I can honestly say that I've never heard the fan on my MBP 14. Never. But it's nice to know that it has a fan if I were to need to push it to max performance, instead of throttling down performance on an overheated, fanless MBA.
The 14" MacBook Pro is too large and bulky. It weighs almost 1 pound more than the M2 MacBook Air. It gets much worse battery life. It has a fan. I use my M1 MacBook Air to develop software (reactjs right now) and the M1 has plenty of power. The lack of a fan only throttles a bit after several minutes of high intensity CPU use. For my purposes the M2 MBA is much better since I don't really encounter high intensity CPU very often. When I do, it slows down by 15%, big deal. The only issue is that if I need a lot of containers, then 16 GB can be a bit small. I haven't run into any problems yet but another 8 GB will make me not have to think about it.
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. The M1 is a very fast SoC. The 4 performance cores are adequate for my use (software development using ReactJS right now). I use a couple of Docker containers and those can eat up RAM pretty fast. Right now 16 GB has been fine but I want a little more room for future needs.
Because I have a M1 MBA, a 2019 MBP 16" i7, and a Dell G15 Ryzen7 5800H RTX3060.
I’m seeing mostly 512 and 1 TB orders here in the thread. Then again, Macrumors is a unique environment of users into Apple products. The average user might just go with the base config unless they visit an Apple store and are encouraged by staff there to double the storage on the base model.
But that's just one type of task. It doesn't apply to everything you do. My main task is mostly single threaded or very short bursts of multi-threaded work. I don't really need more than 4 performance cores for the majority of my day to day use. And Handbrake doesn't need a lot of RAM anyway.
"much worse battery life"? According to Apple, comparing the two models, there is 1 hour more watching movies on the MBA M2 vs MBP 14 M1 Pro. 18 hrs vs 17 hours.
As a software engineer I can assure you that you are 100% wrong.
I don't watch movies on my MacBook. I use it for work. The more relevant battery number is wireless web though that isn't particularly accurate either. But for the sake of argument, wireless web is 11 hours for the M1 Pro MacBook Pro and 15 hours for the M2 MacBook Air. A significant difference. I don't own a MacBook Pro but I can tell you I get through an 8 hour day with more than 50% battery remaining with my M1 MacBook Air. I very much doubt that I could say the same for the M1 Pro MBP.
