I've loved my M1 MBA but I purchased it specifically knowing I have a primary x86 workstation to fallback on for heavier tasks and I'll often give up trying to install some dep/run some program on the MBA and switch to that. It still works great as a general purpose device and I do some dev on it but if you're looking to do all your dev on it, I'd be cautious.
I feel like many many engineers like me would easily get a reliable laptop with MacBook Pro like specs. The problem is that simply does not exist.
Excellent hidpi display.
Ryzen 5000 series CPU with its low power draw.
Good build quality.
Reliable support system.
Non weird components such that a recent release of popular Linux distribution would “just work” without needing manual tweaks.
In my experience, you get 3/5 in the above list at best. Framework laptop hits several of those points but misses out on Ryzen. Another contender on my list is ASUS 14 OLED with Ryzen - I’m worried about their support system though.
How is the trackpad?
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Probably not any better either. If you want to run docker on a mac you probably should not, but the second best strategy is probably to bite the bullet and run an actual VM in which you do your docker stuff.
Odds are a proper and well maintained hypervisor you keep running will be a lot better than whatever DfM does.
Probably, although you probably do still get better thermals and battery life with the M1 Macs.
About 6x worse perf in my specific case.
It makes the case for stuff like GiHub Codespaces or sshing into a remote machine via VS Code a lot more manageable. For everything else, the M1 is a beast, and even emulated, you can get a really good Linux experience (Windows too for that matter — games, obviously not withstanding), but containers? Nah. It’s worse than the already sad state on Intel Macs.