Considering MacBook Upgrade. (MBA vs MBP)

I think, as WheelieNick so wisely pointed out, it depends on how often you're doing video editing. You may want to consider the additional horsepower of the Pro if you edit videos quite often.

Some other considerations:

• You mentioned serious amateur photography. The Pro has an SD card slot built in...something to consider.
• If you think that at some point you'll want to run multiple external monitors, be aware the MacBook Air is limited to one. (It's amazing how often we read here about someone needing to run 2 monitors with their brand new MacBook Air!).
• For photography, the MacBook Air would be just fine, especially when spec'ed with 24GB RAM. I run Photoshop and Lightroom just fine on my 15" MacBook Air with 16GB RAM.
• The gaming you mentioned will run fine on the MBA.
• You didn't say how many peripheral devices you typically have connected. Just know the MBA has only 2 Thunderbolt ports, whereas the Pro has 4 of them.
• We've no idea what the M3 processor will do to M2 prices when it's released (predictions are sometime next year). From past experience, though, sales on the M2's will not come from Apple, but from third party resellers.).

Hope this helps.

The M2, M2 Pro, and M2 Max chips are all very similar with respect to

• Single-core CPU performance – which matters for a lot of interactive editing
• Neural Engine performance – which matters for some AI noise reduction software

The higher-end chips can take more RAM, have better GPUs, and have better multi-core CPU performance (which might matter if you were running long batch jobs that can take good advantage of multiple CPU cores). But if you have enough RAM, you may find the low-end M2 chip to be fine, speed-wise. Especially if you do not use AI noise reduction software, or the software that you plan on using knows how to lean on the Neural Engine rather than on the GPU.

There are things other than raw CPU performance that you may want to factor into your decision.

https://www.apple.com/mac/compare/?modelList=MacBook-Air-M2-15,MacBook-Pro-14-M2,MacBook-Pro-16-M2

The 13" and 15" MacBook Airs

• Has two USB4 (Thunderbolt 3) ports and a MagSafe 3 charging port
• Can drive a single external monitor
• Weigh 3.0 and 3.3 pounds, respectively

The 14" and 16" MacBook Pros

• Have three USB4 (Thunderbolt 4) ports, a MagSafe 3 charging port, a HDMI port, and a SDXC card reader
• Can drive two or more external monitors (see specifications for details)
• Have mini-LED backlit screens to support playing pre-recorded HDR video content
• Have pixels that are crammed a bit closer together – so at 2:1 scaling, you get more workspace; but, on the other hand, you may want to set Displays Settings a notch towards "Larger Text" for most of your daily work
• Weigh 3.5–3.6 and 4.7–4.8 pounds, respectively

For simple photo and video editing the MacBook Air is more then enough If you're planning on rendering long videos you might want to consider a pro as the air does not have fans and can become hot while rendering long 4K videos

We are not allowed to speculate over apple products not yet released so we cannot tell you if it is in your intrest to wait

MacMikeInOK wrote:

• You didn't say how many peripheral devices you typically have connected. Just know the MBA has only 2 Thunderbolt ports, whereas the Pro has 4 of them.

Small correction: The 14"/16" Apple Silicon laptops have 3 of them. There are 4 on the M2 Pro Mac mini, and on the M1/M2 Max Mac Studio.

Servant of Cats wrote:

MacMikeInOK wrote:

Small correction: The 14"/16" Apple Silicon laptops have 3 of them. There are 4 on the M2 Pro Mac mini, and on the M1/M2 Max Mac Studio.

Apologies...Servant of Cats is absolutely correct in that the Pro has 3 Thunderbolt ports, not 4.