I have the Intel 13” MacBook Pro i5 with 16GB from 2020. It’s quiet and the heat is more than acceptable.
I have a 16” mb pro 32g. My son has a M1 air with 16g. His is the better machine - quiet, damn fast and does not radiate your lap. Even if one does a mildly cpu intensive job, the 16” gets hot. Except for the larger display, i am not at all impressed with that mb pro.
If you have no critical apps that must use an intel processor, i’d say go with the M1.
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Reports are that Monterrey solves the hot and noisy external monitor issues with the Intel macbooks. So if you are going to be desktop mode only, you can still use the intel one. That 256gb on the M1 will fill up fast and remember you only have two ports and one of those will be for power, so you will need the added expense of a dock. If you do not need boot camp’d windows, the M1 would probably be the way to go WITH a dock for external hard drives.
I agree to most people’s comment and sentiment here that the M1 Mac is generally a better machine then the Intel. I had a 16"MBP that I can cook an egg on it. However I do have issue with the limited RAM ( I have 16Gb) on my M1 Mac mini and I am struggling with memory from many apps that I have opened. I have another Intel Mac mini that has 32Gb of RAM and does not seem to have this memory issue.
The key offenders are Chrome (unfortunately I have to use Chrome from time to time, although I like Safari), Devonthink, Apple Mail and now the electron version of 1password (ver 8 early release) , see example of below.
Wow, never saw THAT on an Intel machine.
Your screenshot looks pretty normal to me in terms of application and the memory they consume. I’m surprised the Mac says that you have run out of memory. Interesting indeed.
agreed, I have not seen these warnings until I am using M1 Mac. I am currently on Big Sur 11.6 . Hope Monterey can manage RAM much better
Received my MacBook Air M1 with 16GB RAM and oh boy, it is super speedy and snappy! And no fan! Such bliss. Thanks for the recommendation. I now look at the old MBA intel with contempt! Pfffffttttt! 
Oh, I notice that there are some new function keys
- the F4 now launches Spotlight. I must figure out how to launch Alfred instead
- the Fn key can be changed to launch Emoji and Symbol, although, I can’t seem to get that working yet.
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I love the M1. It’s super fast and snappy. I had serious good experience in the first week. On the second week, once my company starts to install enterprise stuff, like Falcon Crowdstrike, Jamf, CrashPlan and whatever else, I do find that at times, there are pauses when launching an app, e.g. when I open Safari, the icon at the dock starts to do it’s jumps and no Safari was launched. When I liked a tweet in Twitterriffic, the rainbow circle starts appearing for a second or two. Activity Monitor shows low CPU, memory usage and yet, why these pauses? It is as though there are these apps are waiting for some other apps or services to allow them to go through. Or, they are trying to phone home. Or something else.
Ugh, enterprise apps are the worse! Leave my M1 alone! No wonder the intel Macs have been screaming!
Your situation makes me sad. Installing enterprise apps on an Apple Silicon Mac is like opening a crummy fast food joint in a fine art museum. I’m in a position where I can restrict my app usage to M1 native code only. (Except for EagleFiler, which has some complicated bits that have not been converted yet but which run seamlessly under Rosetta). And no !@#$%^&* enterprise apps. That’s why Windows machines were created…to run enterprise apps. 
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I have not told you that I am using HCL Notes as email client. Imagine running that on top of Java, which is running on top of Rosetta before being translated into M1 codes. That’s abomination!
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Sadly, I was not able to escape the world of enterprise software and Windows apps until I retired.
Lucky world with enterprise software running mainly online now. I touch those only with my Safari gloves on:)
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