Apple, macOS, and the laptops that run it.

One of the things that's kind of convenient about my work is that I have access off and on to a bunch of different hardware to play with from time to time. 

One of the things that I've been playing with recently is a M2 MacBook Air. 

I did wind up purchasing one of these and returning it a long while back, it was an impulse purchase and at the time it didn't scratch the right itch for me. However I'm going to be needing something that I can haul around and use for personal computing over the next few months and I don't like mixing personal and work data on the same device. 

Given recent problems with Intel CPU's and the fuzzy situation with Windows and where they are going from a privacy standpoint I'm thinking more and more that macOS may be the way to go this time around. 

Given that I have a device I can play with I've been playing around with the base unit and I think that at this point there's a couple of things that I'll have to consider if I'm going to swap over to macOS as a personal device.

1. The AIR would work for a lot of what I do, but if I want to keep playing around with some of the large language models and things of that nature the faster CPU in the MacBook Pro's would be a huge advantage.
2. I would really prefer a high refresh rate display. That's only something that can be had on the Pro models. 

The big down side of this is that the pricing on the pro devices is much higher than the Air, enough that I'm seriously having to think if this is something that I should be picking up. While it's not like I'm going to be replacing the thing in a year it's still a lot of money to put down on a single device. 

I can pickup hardware that will run Windows much cheaper, but unless you are looking at something as expensive end most of the hardware out there isn't  as well put together as a Apple laptop is. Apple's had the design nailed for years and each generation generally just improves on things in small ways (with the exception of that butterfly keyboard from a few years back). 

So is a 120hz panel and the faster CPU worth the extra? To be honest I'm not 100% sure yet.