1. If, and only if, you are doing ML or multimedia, get a 128GB system and because of the cost of that RAM, it would be foolish not to go M3 Max SoC (notwithstanding the 192GB M2 Ultra SoC). Full Stop. (Note: This is also a good option for people with more money than brains.)
2. If you are doing traditional heavyweight software development, or are concerned with perception in an interview, promotional context or just impressing others at a coffee shop, get a 32GB 16” MBP system with as large a built-in SSD as you can afford (it gets cheaper per GB as you buy more) and go for an M2 Pro SoC, which is faster in many respects than an M3 Pro due to core count and memory bandwidth. Full Stop. (You could instead go 64GB on an M1 Max if you keep several VMs open, which isn’t really a thing anymore (use VPS), or if you are keeping a 7-15B parameter LLM open (locally) for some reason, but again, if you are doing much with local LLMs, as opposed to being always connectable to the 1.3T+ parameter hosted ChatGPT, then you should have stopped at #1.)
3. If you are nursing mature apps along, maybe even adding ML, adjusting UX, creating forks to test new features, etc.. then your concern is with INCREMENTAL COMPILATION and the much bigger systems like M3 Max will be slower (bc they need time to ramp up multiple cores and that’s not happening with bursty incremental builds), so might as well go for a 16GB M1 MBA (add stickers or whatever if you’re ashamed of looking like a school kid) and maybe invest the savings in a nice monitor like the 28” LG DualUp (bearing in mind you can only use a single native-speed external monitor on non-Pro/Max SoCs at a time). (In many cases, can even use an 8GB M1 MBA for incremental builds because, after loading the project, the MacOS memory compressor is really good and the SSD is really fast and you can use a real device instead of a Simulator. But do you want any M2 MBA? No, it has inferior thermals, is heavier, larger, fingerprints easy, lack’s respect and the price performance doesn’t make sense given the other options. Same goes for 13” M1/M2 Pro and all M3 Pro.)
Also, make sure you keep hourly (or better) backups on all Apple laptops WHILE CODING. There is a common failure scenario where the buck converter that drops voltage for the SSD fails, sending 13VDC into the SSD for long enough to permanently destroy the data on it.
https://youtu.be/F6d58HIe01A