Honestly, I probably wouldn’t use the max to the full potential. Look at some bg3 performance charts for the m3 family to see how much it might matter. For rendering, they will both be great, but it may just take a bit longer on the pro vs the max.

I don’t believe heat to be a significant issue with the 14 inch device. I am a fan of the smaller form factor and were I to buy one today, I would select the m3 max chip with the 14 inch form factor, but I am selecting it for the gpu cores. If you don’t plan on needing those, the m3 pro is a good chip.

It means that even though Mullvad already doesn’t log anything about their users activities, there is no persistent storage on the servers, so as soon as it is powered off or raided by The Agencies, there is absolutely nothing to retrieve from it.

From what I understand, yes. This vulnerability is to gain information about another user using the same computer (at the same time?). This is why I have disabled the performance-impacting spectre/meltdown mitigations on my home Windows PCs.