I finally gave in and decided to the Apple Silicon world with a new 14" MBP (M1 Pro)- 16 GB RAM and 1 TB drive.
Not all of the kinks worked out yet... a few programs don't seem to play nice, although I'm not sure if it's OS 12.6 or the Silicon. One program that worked in Parallels when I was using Windows 10 isn't working in Windows 11. I'll call customer support tomorrow and I'm sure they will figure it out.
Otherwise... this thing is snappy as hell!