Maxed out MBA vs Standard MBP

You have overlooked one important element: What exact applications will you be using? Do they run on a Mac or are they Windows applications? Contact the University and find out.

The sound from all laptops is marginal at best. If you want good sound, purchase quality earphones.

Ciao.

To be honest I would look at a refurb mbp with a mechanical hard disk, especially for your needs. I suggest staying far away from the newer generations coming out of apple. I do physical data recovery, as in a cleanroom and deepspar operation, and I also repair computers. The SSDs in these new apple laptops fail at a tremendous rate and I can't pull data from them. I had one last week and one this week that had catastrophic failures somewhere on the SSD. The price for a replacement SSD starts at around $450 and goes up to about $600. That's half the cost of a newer mbp.

An earlier version of the mbp will suit your needs just fine and you won't risk losing data to a proprietary and outlandishly expensive SSD down the road. The built in sound on apple products is pretty good but an external USB DAC is going to be much better. I personally use a rather inexpensive soundblaster DAC I got from Amazon.

EDIT: The reason I suggest a mechanical hard disk based storage option is the ease of upgrades to the entire PC. The hard disk can be easily replaced with a standard SSD and the RAM can be upgraded. You CANNOT upgrade RAM on anything made by apple these days - a huge turn off for someone who wants to keep a machine for longer than a few years. The SSDs are upgradable if you'd like to pay out the nose.