I've had multiple M1 Macbook Pros and many x86 (and PowerPC) Macs before that. 1. Performance is great! Doesn't get noisy or hot. Way better than Intel models.

I've had multiple M1 Macbook Pros and many x86 (and PowerPC) Macs before that. 1. Performance is great! Doesn't get noisy or hot. Way better than Intel models. 2. Development is flawless. Nothing is missing. Homebrew works just like before, but installs into a different parent folder for arm (I think). Never hit a case where I couldn't do something because it wasn't supported on M1 or anything like that. 3. The biggest (only?) downside of the M1 architecture is that it isn't an improvement for x86 virtualization because it's not x86 under the hood. So if you run Windows in Parallels, you are going to be running the Arm build of Windows. There's no bootcamp to run Windows natively anymore. Docker performance is going to suffer if you are required to run x86-based Docker images all day. The effective Docker performance probably will be similar to what you get with your x86 mac (i.e. not great) but with less heat/fan noise. If you are in a position where you can run arm-based virtual machines, then you will probably have a great experience. But that's definitely not most people. 4. I'd go for 32GB RAM, especially if you are doing virtualization stuff. I'd bump this up before pretty much any other spec except maybe disk space. tl;dr - The M1 transition has been amazingly flawless except for the corner case of running virtual x86 instances all day.