> Because you can buy an M1 Mac today

You can order one today. I'm still waiting for mine I ordered in March.

I had this exact struggle. Got hit by the delays a couple weeks ago, and got frustrated, cancelled my order, put in another order because I was minorly desperate to get the hardware for a new job, then discovered B&H not only was getting the exact config I wanted in stock, they had a waiting list that I could use to temporarily reserve one. Got the email early in the AM, logged in that day and my hold was still there, and was able to check out without hassle. 2 days later, new laptop in my hot little hands.

You can buy one today… if you’re willing to settle for bare minimum RAM & disk.

Just looked at my local electronics store's website, they have multiple 32GB RAM 14" Pro and 16" Pro models available for pick up.

Just checked and this is true for 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pros and Studios. Mini, and Air ship quickly, even with additionally ram or storage.

...but you better don’t settle for a minimum RAM if you are buying it not just for web surfing.

Memory management on M1 is actually quite amazing. With an entry level M1 mini, I can have a crap ton of stuff open and it doesn’t choke. I can run UTM and have Chrome and a few electron apps open, and have many terminal windows open. No sweat.

For disk, I just put a 1tb NVMe in an external USBC enclosure, cuz most of my data doesn’t need crazy I/O and I feel like Apple charges too much for disk space.

I own one M1 with 8Gb RAM, one with 16Gb, and one with 32 - 8Gb was enough only for basic tasks (I’m a web developer, TS + Rust). Anything non-trivial was causing swapping.

Memory management is quite usual, nothing magical. The disk is faster, but it's not the reason to rely on swapping, still.

That just isn't true on these M1 machines. People are editing 4k, 6k, even 8k video on these and have stated that it runs better than their 2020 16GB i9 MacBooks.

There is no magic, and “unified memory” just means that you need some more memory because you have no additional “VRAM”.

What’s the entry level spec for RAM? Like 8GB? That’s plenty for most things. I’d be more worried about disk.

16. I have an M1 Mac mini under the desk that has been doing more than fine for most of my development work on 8 GB of RAM.

Also there is more to a laptop than just its CPU. Doesn't matter how great the Ryzen processor is if they can't get laptop manufacturers to put them into great laptops.

GP is proposing using Macbook as thin client to Ryzen build server. Laptop cpu is never loaded hence 2 day battery life, performance is better on anything benefiting from significant parallelization. I use same workflow with 5950X[0], works great.

[0] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101