Just to add personal experience: I’m a software engineer and completely switched to Macs for the past 10+ years (before that I was used to Windows and Linux machines for almost 2 decades), my workhorse is a M1 Max 64GiB, etc. but for my personal needs in photography and music I bought a M1 Air 16GiB/512GiB storage in 2021 and have been 100% satisfied with it. There’s nothing I’ve tried to do yet that I felt the M1 Air being slow, I don’t do 3D but I play around with Resolume and some other lighting/DMX stuff.
It’s snappy, much more than my old work computer (a 2019 MacBook Pro Intel maxxed-out with the i9 and 64GiB RAM), I don’t see myself needing a new personal computer for at least the next 3-5 years, by then my M1 Air will be 5-7 years old.
Storage will eventually thin out, even with a 1TiB internal SSD I wouldn’t be able to have most of my photos + music projects in the computer so I preferred to save money and only get 512GiB. I have 2 external SSDs of 1TiB each for longer term storage, any project I’m currently working on can live in the computer and I offload to the external SSDs once I see my storage filling up.
