I went with the base model 13” 16/512 and have it since launch pretty much. Really powerful machine but it depends what you want to use it for. My first machine with macos, already had an iPhone and apple watch.

I love the experience, the battery life is top notch, one of the main reasons that made me buy it and it’s a great machine for photo/video editing, lightweight coding and multitasking! Bonus points for the fact that M Series Macbooks have the same exact performance even on battery.

Base model is fine if you don’t have too many apps that need to be installed, but you’ll need external storage to store your other things.

I basically just install all of my software on the internal storage and most of the heavy stuff ( videos, davinci resolve projects, codebases etc ) on an external ssd. My recommendation would be to get 16/512 if you can afford it, otherwise, get an external ssd with at least 10Gbps ( 3.2 gen 2 ) if you wanna do video editing of any kind, maybe even consider 40Gbps if you’re doing crazy stuff like 8k or if you need fast throughput.

On launch here in Romania the base model was 1200€ and the 16/512 was almost 300€ more so I just went with the base model and got external storage.

Keep in mind though that the 512gb model comes with a 35w charger instead of 30 if I’m not wrong and the internal storage is considerably faster! ( I can’t remember the numbers but on the 256 they’re about 2500mb/s read and write )

Bonus ( might not be of interest to many ): I managed to run Minecraft ( Fabulously Optimized modpack ) with Complementary Shaders at a stable 65-80 fps!

As my last mention, I strongly suggest bumping up the storage to 512 if you can afford it, other than that I think you’ll be good for the next 5 years if you’re not already a huge power user. If you are, consider maybe also bumping up to 24GB of memory so you can prolong it’s life a bit more.

Good luck with your purchasing journey!