In my personal experience, 13” M1 MacBook Air, 15” M4 Macbook Air, M4 Pro Mac Mini, and MacBook Neo, the Neo is the fastest for single threaded and strictly CPU bound tasks. E.g. calculating 200x200, 1000 max iterations Mandelbrot fractals it does ~785 in ten seconds compared to ~760 on the M4s and somewhere in the 600s for the M1.

Given its RAM size I’m not going to be spinning up VMs, but in terms of general purpose computing it’s more than adequate. And, out of the box, you get a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, video editing, digital audio, web browser, and a bunch of other things. Xcode is free. This is easily a laptop you can buy and use for years in 90% of settings.