>My solution was to dump Apple laptops entirely (which I know a lot of people won't want to do)

I think several will trade their M1 laptops due to the memory, architecture limitations creeping up after long-term usage and realizing they're compromising their previous workflow's productivity benefits. The excellent performance (CPU/power) and surprisingly well built Rossetta 2 has overshadowed potential limitations with memory and IO in the reviews.

Lightning fast opening of apps is great, but it's not much use to people like me who don't close their apps at all! I keep at least 3 browsers(for different projects) with several dozen tabs(with hibernation), Note taking apps, IDE and a VM with a browser open in it. So what's important to me here is the memory, at least 32GB is bare minimum.

> I think several will trade their M1 laptops due to the memory

They'll trade them for new M1 Macs that don't have those limitations, which are estimated to be released this year. This obviously isn't a "forever" limitation. And Apple will release Apple Silicon Macs with more memory long before any other Laptop maker releases a laptop that can compete with all the advantages of the M1.

Last I read, there is potential for the M1 to get eGPU support. Other USB-C to PCIe cards have worked so it seems to be a driver issue and not a hardware limitation. Now whether Apple can work nicely with Nvidia & AMD to get drivers, that is a big question.

GPU over USB if 3rd party drivers can be had is certainly a technical potential (hell PCIe over Ethernet has been a thing for a while) I just don't know if I'd call it a realistic one or one worth using for this use case if it did arrive. Especially since it seems extremely likely the scaled up iterations will be able to do this properly in short order.

I am curious about the other "USB to PCIe cards" though. I know there are NVMe to USB (non TB) adapters these days but I think that's largely due to the NVMe protocol being transport agnostic not that PCIe is actually interacting over the USB connection.

I was under the impression that Thunderbolt and the latest USB protocols actually are PCIe under the hood. This is why you had to have Thunderbolt security, because essentially you can tap deep into the hardware via a simple external port.

Ah yep you're right it supports Thunderbolt 3/USB 4, for some reason I had it in my head the ARM version just had plain USB 3.x type C.

Drivers are an untenable problem. eGPU on regular Macs is helped by there being existing x86 drivers needed for first-party Apple hardware. There’s not much incentive for Apple or the third parties to write drivers targeting Apple silicon for external solutions that aren’t widely used. The cost would far outweigh the income.