I had an M2 Air and ended up swapping for the 14 M1 Pro. The Air was plenty powerful and I loved the weight and battery life, but:
- The 14" Pro's native resolution is 3024x1964, which means at 1512w you're getting perfect doubling of the pixels. The M2 air is natively 2560x1664 but it defaults to 1470x956, so you don't get that clean doubling and the sharpness suffers IMO. You can drop it down to 1280w to increase sharpness but the cost in screen real estate is significant. I'm not sure understand your point about the Air's resolution being more mainstream or usable
- The black levels on the MPB's mini-LED LCD screen are vastly better than the M2 Air.
- As someone who's only used MPBs over the last 10 years, the speakers on the Air sound truly awful — tinny, harsh, low volume. Not just for music, but I found listening to a podcast or watching a TV show to be fatiguing and unsatisfying.
- I upgraded my Air's SSD because the default SSD is slow, so the price was $1500+tax; Best Buy was running a sale on MBP 14" that put it at $1600+tax, so all told the significant price gap was almost entirely negated.
Those are good points; I will say in particular the speakers on my MBP are amazing and have provided the music for lots of occasions, and video calls are great. But my partner has an M1 Air and they're totally fine to me. Maybe if you're sensitive you should beware, but then you should beware of all non-MBP laptop speakers.
I use the incredible SwitchResX [0] so you can get the res and refresh rate you want. I wear contacts so I tend to use screens at native resolution, and I'd probably either have the Air at native or one tick down. Native on the 14" is too small even for me (this is less font size and more low-contrast UIs though), but I had my 2018 MBP 16" at native and it was pretty good, so maybe what I'm complaining about doesn't apply to that size.
Black levels are good, but I suspect the blooming is responsible for the difference between dark on light and light on dark. If I were in video or photography this might be a good tradeoff, but for Vim it's not ideal--I'd prefer an IPS.
I'll also say my MBP was $3,700, so jumping down to the M2 Air (24GB, 2TB) is a $1,200 savings. There's a lot you can do with configurations, but higher end MBPs are just in their own class. I justify it by saying "well of course I would spend $5/day to use a computer, which is about 2 years, and if I stretch it out to 3 it's a pretty good upgrade cycle (plus resale maybe).
- The 14" Pro's native resolution is 3024x1964, which means at 1512w you're getting perfect doubling of the pixels. The M2 air is natively 2560x1664 but it defaults to 1470x956, so you don't get that clean doubling and the sharpness suffers IMO. You can drop it down to 1280w to increase sharpness but the cost in screen real estate is significant. I'm not sure understand your point about the Air's resolution being more mainstream or usable
- The black levels on the MPB's mini-LED LCD screen are vastly better than the M2 Air.
- As someone who's only used MPBs over the last 10 years, the speakers on the Air sound truly awful — tinny, harsh, low volume. Not just for music, but I found listening to a podcast or watching a TV show to be fatiguing and unsatisfying.
- I upgraded my Air's SSD because the default SSD is slow, so the price was $1500+tax; Best Buy was running a sale on MBP 14" that put it at $1600+tax, so all told the significant price gap was almost entirely negated.