I’m on a maxxed out M2 with 24GB RAM right now. Never let me down in almost 2 1/2 years and I prefer to it the M4 MBP I had at my last employer. Doing local devops/software engineering/local LLM stuff on it. Some containers, VMs, minor graphical touchups.

Paid ~2200EUR for it with AppleCare. You can get a used one (starting at 512GB storage) for 1000EUR now. M3 really isn’t worth it. The M4 are quite powerful (+2 efficiency/performance cores) and you get proper Thunderbolt 4 support to run more than 1 external display.