Enjoy—these are great laptops. Just make sure the Model you purchase uses the Apple Neural Engine. I understand some of the lower-end models don’t. I have a MacBook Pro M3 PRO Chip, and it utilises the AME.
Also, depending on the country you purchase in, Apple has a 14-day return policy—no questions asked—but I think this only applies if you purchase directly from Apple.
As always, purchase as much memory RAM and Drive as you can afford, given that Macbooks are still not that easy to upgrade.
Every Apple Silicon Mac ever made has 16 Neural Engine cores, except the Ultra model Mac Studios and Mac Pros which have 32.
Each series of M chips has improved the core performance.
Indeed…and I’m still happy with the performance I get from PhotoLab 8 on my 2020 M1 MacBook Air.
For many years, the advice was to invest in memory rather than in processing power (if one’s budget is limited) and this still seems to be good advice. The M1 has plenty power for everything happening in the user interface and export times easily compete with my 2019 5K iMac with Intel i9. I’ve checked for swapping occasionally and never saw it, neither with 40GB on Intel nor with 16GB on AppleSilicon. I also don’t leave a lot of stuff open normally.