Macbook air m4

I need a new laptop asap and I’ll be doing machine learning for my thesis later in the year. When I asked my prof what kind of laptop I need, he only recommended i7 and 16gb RAM. I’m not familiar with laptop specs and I haven’t done ML before. He also said that I might be using images for ML (like xray images for diagnosis) and I’m probably using python. I would like to know if macbook air m4 is okay for this level of ML. Thank you!