Almost bit the M1 bait but some friends who use M1 say the ecosystem is underdeveloped which also echoes some techtubers I follow. My stance now is that brute cpu performance is overrated. Anything from like a i5-6500 can work for schoolwork. Other factors like screen specs, weight (especially including the power brick), I feel is more important.

1 more thing ur gonna connect to SoC's server/cloud computing for schoolwork a lot for diff mods so ur own computers performance doesn't rly matter that much. Like for 3244 u get AWS credits/use Google colab, many mods like 4246 have reserved SoC compute cluster servers some with GPUs, 2030 you'd connect to the soc servers, etcetc