I’m curious about your comment on the fans on the 14” coming on sooner and being louder… I’ve edited both photos and video on my 14” that not only brought the fans, but the spinning ball of boredom on my i9 with 32 gigs of ram on my 15” on the same 32” 4k monitor for both machines; and have never heard the fans or slowed down the M1 Pro, while having multiple apps open including Safari with multiple windows with multiple tabs in each window… Granted YMMV, and the 14” v 16” is a very personal choice based on many considerations… but I’m reading your post as the 14” is significantly inferior to the 16”, technically…
Am I reading you right?
The 14" and 16" offer the exact same configurations, so one is not technically inferior than the other. Both can run under sustained load without thermal throttling (out of the box, who knows what's going to happen when there's dust inside after a few years).
However, the 14" is smaller and has a smaller cooling system (heat pipes and fans) than the 16". If you don't have the option to open up both yourself, Anthony from LTT did it in a YouTube video, you can see the difference there. When running the 14" Pro with 3800RPM it's around 30dB(A) noise. If you really stress it, the fans will go up to between 5000 and 6000RPM (actually the left fan can only go up to 5779 and the right to 6.241). At that point the noise will go up to 43.1-49.5 dB(A).
If you look at the same M1 Pro in the 16", even under sustained max load, the fan's are around 3000RPM, so about half of the fan speed of the 14". Noise level is about 37dB(A) then. So approx. 12dB(A) less than the 14".
There are a couple of YouTube videos out there doing detailed measurements of both, but I'd have to dig them up.
One more thing to say, you need to stress the CPU and GPU for a while for the fans to really kick in and reach the RPM and noise level. Very shortly after the load is taken off CPU/GPU, the fans will go down again.
The 14" has a 69.6Wh battery vs the 16"'s 99.6Wh. So given the same load, the 16" will have a longer battery life.
That is all I'm saying.
The rest is subjective, does it bother me in daily usage? No, it doesn't. However, when doing long jobs under load (exporting/converting videos, long compile jobs for larger software projects, etc.) I'll take the fan noise of the 16", especially if it's the Max version. I used to do such things on desktop systems (better cooling systems) in the past, however, the M1 Pro/Max in a MBP is a great desktop replacement now. Both the 14" and 16" are significantly more quiet than the Intel predecessors.