Beck - Like you my wife owns a MBA and I’m envious of how light it is. I have a MBP M3Max 64GB. I wish it were lighter.
In terms of the work load, how often do you have the fans on? That is the workload that needs the more powerful CPU/GPU for longer periods of time. (This isn’t a very good metric, just a gut feeling.)
I suspect the key question is going around local LLMs. I suspect my next computer, aiming M8 generation will have 128GB of RAM, because I frequently run out of RAM bigger local LLMs. Also running a local models is what needs more GPU cores. see: M3 Max Memory and Bandwidth - #11 by mlevison and M5 and local models - #5 by johnlaudun