I’m starting to worry that I’m missing out on some huge gains (M1 Air user.) But as a programmer who’s not making games or anything intensive, I think I’m still good for another year or two?
You're not going to be missing out on much. I had the first M1 Air and recently upgraded to an M3 Air. The M1 Air has years of useful life left and my upgrade was for reasons not performance related.
The M3 Air performs better than the M1 in raw numbers but outside of some truly CPU or GPU limited tasks you're not likely to actually notice the difference. The day to day behavior between the two is pretty similar.
If your current M1 works you're not missing out on anything. For the power/size/battery envelope the M1 Air was pretty awesome, it hasn't really gotten any worse over time. If it does what you need then you're good until it doesn't do what you need.
I have a 2018 15" MBP, and an M1 Air and honestly they both perform about the same. The only noticeable difference is the MBP takes ~3 seconds to wake from sleep and the M1 is instant.
I have an M1 Air and I test drove a friend's recent M3 Air. It's not very different performance-wise for what I do (programming, watching video, editing small memory-constrained GIS models, etc)
I wanted to upgrade my M1 because it was going to swap a lot with only 8 gigs of RAM and because I wanted a machine that could run big LLMs locally. Ended up going 8G macbook air M1 -> 64G macbook pro M1. My other reasoning was that it would speed up compilation, which it has, but not by too much.
The M1 air is a very fast machine and is perfect for anyone doing normal things on the computer.
