Even if you don’t need the money that’s just completely pointless and 99% of people would benefit from an extra 1k

I too would’ve gone for a Mac mini but I can’t go without the portability of a laptop. My previous laptop was an i5 11320h with 8gb ram which was fine, I was mainly programming desktop apps, the ram would start to struggle when I was using SQL management server. CPU was never an issue. Unless you’re programming huge complex applications that would use large amounts of cpu on the end users machine, any apple silicon chip will be fine

I had a m2 mba with 8gb ram and i started an empty SwiftUI project and it immediately got extremely hot and was using more swap than memory (10gb swap) and that’s without even writing a line of code so I swapped it for a m2 mbp, you don’t need a mbp for Xcode but it was on offer at the time so i got it anyway

Do you plan to code with SwiftUI? If so, do not go for a 8gb ram model