So I changed jobs in May 2021. Had been a happy Intel mac user since the intel switch (my first Mac was a PowerBook). New employer supplied me an M1 MBP and I was fucking delighted, since I didn’t have the means to buy my own at the time.
Contrary to other comments later, I have no niche needs. Well… I’m predominantly a Perl coder, so that’s niche but nothing to do with architecture. I spend most of my days with just iTerm, a couple of browsers, Slack. Not much else. I’ve been an edit-over-ssh developer for 20 years.
My M1 was also my first experience of Big Sur, so I was never sure whether my issue was hardware or software. But issues I had:
• frequently it would stop all ipv4 networking, going ipv6 only (which in practical terms meant I went offline)
• I would often - multiple times a week - lose all sound devices. Suddenly things would go silent, and all inputs/outputs (including the built in speakers/mic) would disappear from preferences. For a while only a reboot would fix it, until I learned to `killall coreaudiod`
• chrome would often say “you don’t have a camera”, which I could only fix by a reboot (we use Google Meet, and safari was always terrible with it. But I just prefer chrome anyway)
I had a variety of other problems but can’t recall them clearly enough to list them, especially from this temporal distance.
[EDITED to add: I did go through hardware checks and company IT checks, but nothing ever came up as faulty]
I did love that it was silent and permanently cool, but that was about it. Since it too was always plugged in, any difference in trackpad or keyboard or battery life made zero odds to me, and that’s why those things don’t matter to me about the Starbook either.
When Monterey came out I upgraded and actually things got mostly (but not entirely) better. But by that time I’d ordered the Starbook, and the desktop Linux experience has been so good - not to mention just a refreshing change - that I don’t regret it one bit. And if I do, well, the work MBP is sat in the corner and I can resurrect it…