After spending hours researching (I genuinely mean that) I've chosen to go for a MacBook air (purchasing soon), the main reason is that the hardware is just BETTER. I did email someone at the uni I'll be studying at and they did say an x86 CPU would be ideal if I wanted to replicate the machines at university but you can use apple silicon, this is where I was skeptical but I did come across parallels and for anyone who doesnt know you can essentially run windows and Linux on mac virtualized, this was the deciding factor on whether I would purchase or not! I probably will end up doing a detailed review just before starting uni about the M4 air for anyone who is interested. What are you guys using? What are your experiences?

I'm going to make a classroom for CompSci resources so if anyone recommends anything please drop them below.