My partner also works in tech. Between the two of us, and between home and work, we've bought or used probably 25-30 of these over the years. I gave her an M1 air this holiday season! We've had pros, airs, and iMacs in four or five different colors occupying our living spaces for fifteen or twenty years now. We've used them for work and for play, for software development and video editing and graphic design and media consumption.

My verdict is: the hardware is usually GREAT but MacOS isn't. It bothered me when I quit the platform ages ago, and it is still bothering me now: little I care about has changed or improved. New annoyances though!

In aggregate I'd say I've spent ca. 15 hours staring at the beachball. Intrusive admin software has been a problem in the past for sure -- especially at Google -- but I've bought dozens of these for home use as well. Either 90% of their units are defective or we're using our computers very differently.

Terrible keyboards are another thing entirely, Lenovo went through a bout of that with the X1. My gripes about Macs are almost entirely about OSX performance/reliability and command-line habitability: version over version, it almost never improves. For my workflows

If you are unable to successfully log in after two boots, you get booted into a password recovery mode that has options including "My keyboard works but I am unable to enter my password", and on the reset options, makes mention of being careful about the characters you choose...

... so a bit more commonplace than "defective unit" or "admin software".