I’m looking to upgrade from my 2018 MB Pro 13” as my battery has been having issues (can’t be unplugged) for around a year now. Besides the battery, my main issues are a lack of ports (2 USB-Cs) and small RAM and SSD space (8Gb and 256).

I’ll be starting graduate school next summer and my top priorities for a new machine are more RAM, SSD space (16, 512 ideally) and for it to be as “future proof” as possible. I do a lot of normal web browsing while using a word processor, light gaming, occasional light programming and seldomly running analyses from terminal and moving large files around (bioinformatics related). I’d like this thing to last well over 5 years and be able to handle whatever I need to throw at it.

I’ve had good experiences with Apple Refurbished and would like to get either an M2 Air 13” or an M1 Pro 14”. Either with 16Gb RAM and 512 SSD. I like the lightness of the Air but the additional ports on the Pro. The price difference on refurbished for either of these is $1369 or $1539, respectively. For my use case, which one of these machines would be better? I could afford either, but obviously money saved is always better.