I briefly tested the base M1 Air with 8gb of ram (bought for my wife) - enough to get my day-to-day stuff up and running. I’m comparing a 2017 MacbookPro, dual-core i5 with 16GB of RAM.

Brew: under Rosetta everything seems to work

Java/Clojure: the AdoptOpenJDK works fine but the performance is not good; similar numbers with my old machine. The Azul ARM JDK is literally twice as fast. The jsass library depends on a native binary which doesn’t exist for ARM which is a roadblock.

MongoDB and Redis work fine under Rosetta.

I didn’t have more time as I had to send it back because of a wrong keyboard (I’ve put in the wrong order) but something missing from the various benchmarks is the clear wins in UI zippiness, and the silence and relative lack of heat when the machine is taxed.

I’m looking forward to the replacement arriving so I can try a video call.