I recently purchased a 15" M2 16gb 512 SSD MBA from best buy for $1449. The main reason I bought it over the MBP was for the weight. My walk to class is around 15-25 minutes so I wanted something light. However, the MBP (16gb 512 SSD) is on sale for $150 more than the MBA and I’m wondering if it would have been smarter to just get the MBP.

Since I am studying CS, my main usage for my laptop will be coding. This semester, I’ve mainly had eclipse, vscode, mysql, discord, and the vscode live server and tomcat server running all at once. I am also interested in audio programming so occasionally i’ll have visual studio (will need to switch to xcode) and Ableton running at the same time. Next semester will probably be more of the same with some C++ and OpenGL for my video game programming class. I also occasionally work with photoshop/illustrator.

Considering my workload, will the MBP be the better choice? I plan to use my new laptop for my remaining 3 semesters and also my software engineering internship next summer; which will probably have me working with backend technologies.

For reference, my current laptop is a Lenovo - IdeaPad Gaming 3i 15" Intel Core i5-11300H - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 - 8GB Memory - 512GB SSD, which is able to handle my current workload for about 2 hours before dying.