M1 vs M2 for Lightroom: M1 is still plenty for most users

The M1 MacBook Air already handles Lightroom smoothly — even raw files from a Sony A7III with masking and adjustments. The M2 is only 10–15% faster in exports and slightly smoother in large libraries, but Lightroom doesn’t heavily rely on GPU acceleration. RAM is the real bottleneck, and both support 16GB. Unless you’re a pro editing huge batches of high-res RAW files all day, the M1 is more than enough.