Being Bluetooth, technically the Airpods will connect to say, a Dell laptop, but in practice they will have erratic behavior, which you can solve by buying a mac... and teaching said old folks how to use MacOS instead of Windows.
Bam. Work perfectly after that.
I recently went through this with a new Windows laptop. It was quite a shock after being in the Mac world for years how bad an experience Windows and headphones is.
Same issue on Macs for what it's worth. If you are listening to music and a meeting starts and the mic turns on, the protocol will switch and everything will sound like crap.