I'm happy to hear about your experience with the M4 Pro MBP. It's a lovely beast of a machine!

Regarding your point about the active vs passive cooling, I believe there are still powerful apps that aren't optimised on a passively cooled silicon such as M3 MBA and providing sustained performance.

For example, Apple Intelligence might be fine with passive cooling, but I've noticed Apple's Image Playground suffering from overheat on an M3 MacBook Air simply because it throttled due to high temperatures.

I believe apps are heading towards running custom, offline, on-device AI models which will require powerful chips running sub 80 degrees temperatures.

Thanks for sharing your comment and I appreciate the point about ordering the custom config online vs in-store.