Another vote in favor of the Air for most people. I have an M2 Air with 24gb and a 16" M1 Pro or Max from work with tons of RAM and while I'm aware the 16" is vastly superior in a lot of ways on paper, in practice I hardly ever notice (or actually can't tell). The M2 has been powerful enough for everything I've thrown at it and then some; CaptureOne, dev work in Scala, fairly large Rust projects in VSCode, the occasional VM, 3d modelling, never felt bogged down. 24GB has been plenty for me and I've been kinda worried since I had more on my previous machine, but even with a bunch of containers and a VM here and there plus hundreds of tabs, half a dozen VSCode windows, CaptureOne in the background, a bunch of electron apps, ... it holds up just fine, with room to spare; not sure how that's possible, but I'm pretty sure it's managing to fit almost as much into 24gb than a previous Intel did into 32gb.
Having no fan is an absolute game changer not just because of dust, but this way I can have the machine running near its thermal ceiling for extended amounts of time without going crazy from the fan noise, very handy when gaming, which I wouldn't want to do on the other Macbooks for that reason. I had to put a CPU indicator into the menubar because there's no way to hear high load anymore, so it's very easy to miss that Steam has crashed again and is now keeping all cores maxed etc. The silence really nice when using it in a quiet space, e.g. for tethered shooting without disturbing people, or in the quiet coach of a train, absolutely love it. I'd recommend the one with fewer GPU cores since that might give you slightly worse graphics, but it'll thermal throttle later and less overall when gaming or rendering.
Other differences that aren't as drastic as the specs suggest include the display, which other than the difference in real estate, I can't say I've ever really noticed to be worse, it looks gorgeous despite its significantly lower specs. The 16" has very nice sound for a laptop, but the Air sounds way better than anything that thin should, it's better than the stereo speakers in my Dell monitor, fine for a quick round of casual gaming and the like. Connectivity might be a dealbreaker (esp. the single external display), but it fits what I need well (except for the SD card reader, would love to have that). And it's pretty lightweight, very sturdy, thin, compact, which is what ultimately made me pick it, much more suitable for travelling and having it in a backpack when cycling and the like. It'll even run off a tiny 30W power bricklet!
Having no fan is an absolute game changer not just because of dust, but this way I can have the machine running near its thermal ceiling for extended amounts of time without going crazy from the fan noise, very handy when gaming, which I wouldn't want to do on the other Macbooks for that reason. I had to put a CPU indicator into the menubar because there's no way to hear high load anymore, so it's very easy to miss that Steam has crashed again and is now keeping all cores maxed etc. The silence really nice when using it in a quiet space, e.g. for tethered shooting without disturbing people, or in the quiet coach of a train, absolutely love it. I'd recommend the one with fewer GPU cores since that might give you slightly worse graphics, but it'll thermal throttle later and less overall when gaming or rendering.
Other differences that aren't as drastic as the specs suggest include the display, which other than the difference in real estate, I can't say I've ever really noticed to be worse, it looks gorgeous despite its significantly lower specs. The 16" has very nice sound for a laptop, but the Air sounds way better than anything that thin should, it's better than the stereo speakers in my Dell monitor, fine for a quick round of casual gaming and the like. Connectivity might be a dealbreaker (esp. the single external display), but it fits what I need well (except for the SD card reader, would love to have that). And it's pretty lightweight, very sturdy, thin, compact, which is what ultimately made me pick it, much more suitable for travelling and having it in a backpack when cycling and the like. It'll even run off a tiny 30W power bricklet!