MacBook Air M4 is glitching with 200 Safari tabs while iPad Pro M4 handles 1000

You're comparing apples to oranges. They are different operating systems. Without more information (e.g. amount of RAM on your MBA, what else you have open, what you mean by "glitching"), it's hard to give a specific answer.

I'd start by running Activity Monitor to see what's going on.

You may also want to run and post an etrecheck report so people can get a better sense of whats happening on your computer.

https://etrecheck.com/en/index.html

FYI, the MBA is not the "Flagship" computer. That would be the MBP.

Our friend, @Idris Seabright, has suggested that you run an EtreCheck evaluation of your Mac.

I agree with their recommendation.

Without the info provided by that or some other diagnostic tool, then all we can provide here are guesses based on experience and symptoms but not data.

Re: the suggestion of our friend, @Lawrence Finch, to check Activity Monitor for clues, you'll want to see what apps and/or processes are eating CPU cycles and also see what the Memory Pressure graphic look like. To simply say that

Activity Monitor shows all the websites and Safari is not helpful to discovering what is going on with your Mac.

Activity Monitor User Guide for Mac - Apple Support

It seems likely that Safari on the iPad isn't keeping the contents of 1000 Web pages open, or even trying to do so. Beyond a certain point, it might be dumping the contents of the tabs that are not currently visible on the screen, and then reloading those tabs when you switch to them. The Mac version of Safari may be trying to keep more of those tabs loaded, even when they are not visible. This is just a wild guess, as I have not seen any of the source code, or any developer documentation describing Safari's strategies for handling massive numbers of tabs.

Then there's the fact that many sites these days have constantly-playing advertising videos or animations, whose rendering consumes system resources. Some sites tailor their formatting depending on the device you are using (phone, tablet, computer), so it seems possible that, on average, the Mac is being forced to update more of these resource-sucking video advertisements than an iPhone or iPad might be.

Alex_44 wrote:

it has a 16 gb of ram, I don't have anything else open and by glitching I mean barely usable, like it freezes, is unresponsive and other. I thought MacBook was supposed to be super optimized?

What does Activity Monitor show? And if the MacBook Air was as powerful as a MacBook Pro why would Apple even make the MackBook Pro?