I’m a long time Mac user, but they’re right, the platform is not as important as the actual hardware. It is possible to spec a great or terrible Mac or PC. A properly specced Mac or PC can run Lightroom Classic very well and do AI Denoise in around a minute or less, and if you dump a lot more money into it, a Mac or PC can get that time down to under 20 seconds.
The 15-inch M2 MacBook Air that you mentioned is a good (not ideal) choice for average graphics/photo work incluiding AI Denoise. The Air is great at short bursts of performance, like editing one image at a time in Photoshop or Lightroom Classic. One thing that would push someone to a MacBook Pro would be work that maxes out the processor for more than a few minutes, like building hundreds of Lightroom Classic previews or extended video editing/effects sessions. The reason is that the MacBook Air has no fan, and the Pro does have them. If the Air is given a job that keeps the processor at maximum temperature for more than a few minutes, it will need to slow down to stay within temperature limits.
Also, if I was buying a 15-inch MacBook Air that I wanted to work well for 5 years, I would max out the memory at 24GB. On Apple Silicon Macs, GPU memory comes out of system memory, and Lightroom Classic prefers at least 12GB on its own for optimal performance. 16GB will probably be fine for most things, so if you’re budget limited, go with that. But if you want to ensure enough memory for Lightroom Classic, plus macOS, plus graphics acceleration, plus any other software you want to run at the same time, and account for rising memory requirements, consider more than 16GB. (I chose a MacBook Pro with 32GB, but that’s because I do tend to keep several big apps open, and sometimes do processor-intensive video editing/effects.)
What an Apple Silicon (not Intel) Mac is really good at right now is power efficiency. If it is very important to work on battery on graphics/photo tasks for much of a work day, a Mac (especially the M2 Air) is a good choice because Apple Silicon generally needs less power than Intel for comparable performance. If you buy a PC laptop and need to run it on battery a lot for pro work, make sure that model doesn’t slow itself down too much on battery, because many do. Also, the more powerful the laptop graphics card, the more likely a PC laptop will have to drop graphics performance on battery, if for example the graphics card needs to draw 100-150 watts. (The fast-charge AC power adapter option for the M2 MacBook Air is just 70 watts, the standard adapter is 35 watts.) This difference is less important if the laptop will be used on AC power most of the time, because PC laptops with the most powerful GPUs tend to have large, high-wattage AC adapters.
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