I just received mine (M1 MBA 16GB/ 1 TB) yesterday and had been playing around with it. The performance is as impressive as expected. (For reference I ran the same (Cinebench R15) got 100fps opengl test and 1000-ish cb on cpu multi. All that on Rosetta)
But....
i had big problems with how locked down Big Sur is and the Macbook itself.
You lose the ability to freely mod system files in this version. Even with SIP and ARV disabled you would still need to “re-seal” the volume once it has been modified. There is way to bypass this (and run on live system as opposed to a “sealed” apfs snapshot) on my older Intel Macs but the same method doesn’t work on new M1 Macs.
I eventually broke the install trying to solve this (and eventually. recovery, as I ran rm-rf / in recovery in anger)
Now, with intel Macs you have internet recovery when things got messed up. On this thing? Tough luck if this thing dies on you in the field with no second mac around as this machine can either do external boot, or get into DFU mode and use Apple Configurator 2 on a second mac (So this is a giant iDevice now?) Which somehow require that your second Mac running it must be at least same version as your dead mac. (According to MRMacintosh site)
This is where am stuck with for now, as the MBA keeps disconnecting from my host mac while I am trying to “revive” it using the configurator.
Personally, It think new design is terrible. Title bars are wayyyy too thick, wasting screen real estate, new alert sounds are yucky, Apple’s own services bypass firewall, AS Macs wont run iOS apps with SIP off, icons, etc...<insert other nitpick here>
but my take away is this:
If Apple is going to do limit my control over my own hardware, the least they could do is make software at least customizableand recovery experience not this aggravating.
Chances are that I am returning this.
