Depends on what you do. Best bet is to find benchmarks from the various M3 reviews and see if any are similar to your workflow. For Geekbench 6, the M1 Max is a

Depends on what you do. Best bet is to find benchmarks from the various M3 reviews and see if any are similar to your workflow. For Geekbench 6, the M1 Max is about 2400/12700 while the M3 is about 3100/12000, so for CPU constrained tasks they be almost the same, with the Air perhaps throttling a bit if you run at full power for longer periods of time. But an M3 Max gets you a multicore score of 19600, which could be a nice improvement if you do a lot of parallel work.