For context, I purchased the entry-level 8GB M1 Air last year as a portable secondary Mac for my 27” 10-core i9, 64GB iMac. Mainly used for web and some embedde

For context, I purchased the entry-level 8GB M1 Air last year as a portable secondary Mac for my 27” 10-core i9, 64GB iMac. Mainly used for web and some embedded development. 1 - Subjectively it feels so much more responsive and faster than the iMac. Everything that runs single-threaded is measurably as fast if not faster, especially in the webdev world. Building massive C/C++ projects that are properly multithreaded do build faster on the iMac. The Air has no vents, so it’s completely silent and only gets somewhat warm if I played a few hours of WoW on it. 2 - Proper virtualization is still lacking on M1/M2. Haven’t done any Android development on the Air yet, but the iOS simulator works great. 3 - Haven’t had any major issues with Docker compared to the Intel-based Mac 4 - Can’t hurt to max out RAM, but surprisingly I haven’t really experienced any significant slowing down due to swapping on the 8GB Air vs the 64GB iMac, which seems crazy, but there you go. Overall, the Air is now my daily driver and the Intel iMac is sitting idle. Most likely will end up selling the iMac soon.