I meant the only downside of not using a pro for my use-case is that I don't have a HDMI port on device with high refresh rate. I have a decent dock that can give me 4k/60hz HDMI but not 120hz refresh for macs (it works on windows). It's a minor thing but having 120hz is nice when I'm docked at home.
I’m also the kind of person who close tabs and I like to work on one task at a time.
(Edit: saying this as someone who just paid for a new 128GB M5 Pro Studio -- but that's for LLM's, not regular work)
If it was more readily available on retailers such as Amazon I would even recommend 32gb ram air for local workflows - if you're doing development these days you're just going to need it - especially with LLM workflows and parallelizing work. The price difference between 16 and 24 is not even close to not justify picking it for a work machine.
Thing is having more cores/faster cores might make your workflows 1-2x faster but hitting swap is going to be like >10x degradation
I'm currently SSH-ing into my workstation from my M4 Air with 24 gb ram and it's ideal for this flow. Slack/editors/clients/browsers/etc. easily gobble up over 16 GB. I have no more dev tools/compilers/source on my client machines, everything is dockered up on remote workstation in isolated VMs (too much supply-chaining).
My only downside to using a pro is not having 120/4k HDMI port on air and my dock won't support it with Apple (it does with windows)