I switched to Mac 11 years ago, and for that entire period, I had the same laptop, a Macbook Pro, late-2011 model. After the initial adjustment, it has been a great laptop for all of these years. I used it for school, work, online browsing, a few applications, and streaming videos. I have never gamed on my 2011 laptop. Of course, it slowed down considerably after several years, and software and hardware updates can only help so much with an older model. So, I finally decided to purchase a new laptop, and based on my research on recent macbook models, the price and value was right on this 2020 Macbook Air.

i bought parallels desktop and a windows 11 license. I need it to try a certain amount of things in IT, however, the performance when running windows in a virtualized environment (like parallels is) it gets seriously affected on the M1, something that didnt happen with intel processors. You notice the performance degrading (but not that much, maybe 10, or even 15% i risk to say) when switching between full screens and main desktop with windows (full separate screen, remember that theres an option to seamlessly integrate within your macOS)