There is one area where the M1 is lacking - software support. There are still areas (eg Docker) that don't work well. It's definitely coming but it isn't here yet.
If you work outside of those areas though, an Apple Arm CPU is amazing.
If you work outside of those areas though, an Apple Arm CPU is amazing.
I was worried about software compatibility on m1 and was glad to have my intel imac for those things it couldn’t do, but in practice it now does everything. Some things require a bit of googling, but that’s par for the course for developer tools. And on the upside, the m1 runs rings around the 9600K in my iMac and it does this without a fan.
One of the reasons Mac was so nice was that everything worked the same locally as it did on Linux prod machines, whereas even today there are subtle bugs with naive Java or Python code that doesn't deal with paths or line endings correctly. On big multi-team projects, there are always some junior devs on Windows that just don't get it right.
This seems like another problem waiting to happen as more devs start using Arm, while the majority of developers and environments still use X86.
For images with an Arm version available, and that's seemingly quite a lot, it mostly just works(TM). No Dockerfile changes needed.
If you have no other options, you can even run x64 stuff with a bit of low impact futzing. Docker Desktop will use QEMU to do this for you, nearly seamlessly. (though rather slowly)
The biggest gripe I have is the local volume perf, which is "tolerable." This is a problem for Intel Macs too, although to a lesser extent.
(edit for typo)
I don't push containers from my laptop to anywhere, instead those are built on CI/CD... and we are building both x86_64 and ARM containers these days as we are launching new workloads on Amazon's Graviton because it is cheaper and more cost effective.
The eco-system is not just x86 anymore.