@CHPhoto I thought that the licence was for three systems with the Elite version and have believed that the licence can be for Windows and Mac, i.e. a mixed estate.
Regardless of the age of the M1, which may well run well enough as stated by @platypus who suggests you look for topics concerning running on multiple system, particularly if those systems run on different operating systems.
The databases are incompatible, the DOPs are becoming less compatible depending on the features you use.
The Mac version of PhotoLab tends to offer more features than the Windows version but has the limitation that you can put the database wherever you like but it only runs from the default location.
I was tempted to the look at the Mac when I was looking to purchase a Graphics card for my Windows system but decided that it would be a “one-trick” pony, i.e. all my other software is Windows, some have a Mac version, but it would essentially be for running PhotoLab.
I decided it was too much of a learning curve for a limited benefit, so bought an RTX 3060 for one of my PCs and later bought second hand RTX 2060s for my other two systems.
The systems within your budget new or refurbished have the 2050 and 3050 GPUs and compared to mine we have
and I have a lot of test results for the my 2060s and 3060.
But one final potential issue is that the GPU memory on offer is 4GB and that has been plenty in the past but with the coming of XP2s the Photolab memory requirement has increased and in the future…??
By that I mean the real memory requirement not the ridiculously high requirements put out by DxO, i.e. to achieve them most would have to start buying new GPUs every major release.
However, that means that the 4GB on offer with the laptops might prove too small in the long-term.
I cannot say for certain but on the release of PL8 we discovered that 2GB cards were being automatically failed, erroneously I contend because the warning stated that the cards were being failed because they failed to meet a 1GB minimum requirement!?
Sorry to complicate the issue!? With the Mac I believe that memory is shared between the CPU and the GPU which is certainly more flexible but does that mean that the safe minimum specification might become 16GB.
PS:- @Fineus If you provide a “typical” image and a “typical” DOP I will create a batch of ? (50/100) VCs and/or 50/100 actual duplicate images and run them through PL8 with what you consider an appropriate number of export copies (2, I would suggest, in this case) and see how long they take and how much GPU memory they consume.
PPS:- My statement about the M1 and RAM versus VRAM may well be nonsense @platypus can you help, please.
