Apple currently has 2 lineups of laptops, the first is the Macbook Air, and then the MacBook Pro.
I’ve used both, so let me tell you which one I would pick.
If power and speed was the only choice, you’d pick the most powerful MacBook Pro you could afford.
But there’s also portability: does a 16" MBP fit your backpack when you need to move it or commute or suppose you want to take it with you on a backpacking trip because who knows, you might have to do something for 3 minutes to keep the business running, while you’re camping.

Flavio Copes

Macbook Air or MacBook Pro for Web Development? Apple currently has 2 lineups of laptops, the first is the Air, the second is the MacBook Pro.

Macbook Air or MacBook Pro for Web Development?

In my opinion, after having the opportunity to test both, I would choose the Macbook Pro, simply because the active cooling will ensure good performance all day long.

What about a refurbished MacBook for those with a very tight budget? are those viable solutions for programming?

I would prefer Macbook Air as I costs lesser also It gives same performance as Macbook Pro at least in Web development where you most of the time use only 50% of your resources. I would say if you into more CPU intensive tasks like doing somethign with web crawler or elasticsearch where you have to setup thinngs locally and test, go for Macbook Pro.

There are excellent options from other manufacturers, Apple is not a performance indicator, but the level is hight. I didn’t use powerful laptops myself, so I can’t say who has better cooling, but I can advise to look at other options (performance can even be better and the price is less) from MSI, ASUS (TuF, ROG Strix), DELL (really good for work) with an SSD and 16 GB of RAM

Laptops are compared in the article for various tasks, and if you look at it from the point of view of “enough”, then MacBook Air is the best choice. But it makes no sense to choose by size, Pro has a model in the same size as Air.