Macbook Air M2

An M2 Mac with 24GB of unified memory will not only run Photoshop and Illustrator, you will probably find that it runs them very well, better than the old Intel Macs did.

It’s important to maintain a lot of free space (ideally more than more than 100GB free) on the internal SSD. If an SSD gets close to full, the computer will slow down a lot due to lack of space for the large temporary files that are constantly created.

The Air might not be the best Mac if your Photoshop files are very large. That can mean large pixel dimensions (such as over 50 megapixels), or many layers and Smart Objects. In that case it might be useful to have more than 24GB of unified memory, but that is possible only with the Pro, Max, and Ultra levels of the M2/M3 processor.

If you expect to be using GPU-intensive AI features that you batch-apply to many images at once, such as AI Denoise in Adobe Camera Raw/Lightroom, AI upscaling, or AI generative fill, it might be good to have the more powerful GPU in the Pro, Max, and Ultra levels of the M2/M3 processor. The Air can do it but it might take a little longer.

Frequent batch processing of many images at once (like a 1000-image wedding) may generate enough heat to slow down the M2 Air. This slowdown happens less on the Pro/Max/Ultra levels of the M2/M3 Macs because those Macs have cooling fans. But my guess is heat will not be a problem if you are only working on one document.

If you mostly use more basic features (like layers, painting, and color correction) working on one document at a time, the M2 Air with 24GB unified memory should perform very well in Photoshop and Illustrator, with great battery life.

That computer would be more than sufficient for most use cases. Processes that are more intensive would execute quicker on a M2 Pro/Max or M3 because of the additional cores and power. The memory is unified across the system so the CPU/GPU are pulling from the 24 GB. As a Mac user myself, an M2 Max with 32GB of ram is showing me 22906 MB of GPU accessible RAM. I would expect the Air to be lower, but the amount of VRAM accessible should be relative to your system memory. 

Yes, if you have enough VRAM:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/system-requirements.html