in the Intel era i would say no but nowadays they're solid machines if you just want something that works well without tinkering
however DO NOT CHEAP OUT ON RAM, do NOT buy a MacBook Air or something with 8GB. 16 is the bare minimum. the SSDs in modern macs are unable to be replaced (soldered and likely paired to the board) and if you get one with low RAM it'll rape the SSD via swapping. if you're going to get one for normie stuff (web browsing, watching movies, editing documents) then 16 will be okay but you'll probably need more than that if you want to be futureproof.
the M series chips are really impressive, they use far less energy to do the same things relative to an x86 (intel/amd) cpu. only caveat is that they're not really good gaming machines but nobody plays games on macs anyway