Not the OP but I've been on an M1 Air for a couple of weeks. It's startlingly good. It's been a lot of work to recompile our various dependencies for am ARM64 VM but overall the machine is hands down the best I've ever used.

Went through the same process except with an M1 Macbook Pro. My coworkers volunteered me to see if we could get our dev stack building and running on ARM with hopes they could eventually dump their older x86 Macbook Pros, which run loud and hot.

It was a bit of a process but once we got it working, developing on the M1 has been great. Captured notes on the process here in case it's helpful for anyone later: https://authzed.com/blog/onboarding-with-an-m1/

Excellent work.

More than anything; starting on a new team, sorting out the provisioning process, meaningfully contributing to the team and doing a write up for their blog. I’d wager whoever hired you is very pleased.

Switched from a thinkpad running windows/WSL.

I like the native posix terminal. Much of my work that I used WSL for works natively on Mac anyway.

The battery life is amazing, because I like to work away from an outlet occasionally when my mind needs it. This is the first laptop where I’ve felt comfortable leaving the house (for a full day of work) without a charger.

No fan noise, no heat, no throttling under typical workloads, and no worrying about blocking the intake vents like I did on my thinkpad.

I was concerned about the architecture support at first, but Rosetta 2 has been 100% seamless with the exception of some steam games I tested out, which I don’t care about anyway since this is 100% a development machine.

I don’t do super intensive workloads, but the m1 has been way faster for some of the nodejs work I’ve been doing. Some of my nodejs workloads are seeing a 10x performance increase over my i5 thinkpad.

And of course, you have to love the apple trackpad. I tried a few different Bluetooth mice, but I ended up just using the trackpad instead because the precision feels better than even an Mx master.