The M1 is great indeed but one thing holds true for Apple never buy a first gen device, 3rd Gen onwards is usually where you get to see them becoming viable for long term support.
While the M1 is great there are clearly issues to be ironed out even if it’s just the limited bandwidth available for peripherals.
I’m also betting on major GPU upgrades over the next 2 generations.
I mean, kind of, but it seems that the main issue here with the M1 is that it's only 30% faster than an i9. If I were buying a new Mac today, I would only consider an M1 system. It seems to be better at literally everything I want to do with it than the Intel equivalent.
While M2 will undoubtedly be better yet, I see no downside to jumping aboard M1 today for must people who aren't running specialized software.
M2/M3 is where they’ll likely finalize the majority of their architectural features from a CPU perspective just look at what happened to first Gen Apple devices that used an Apple silicon like well the original iPhone or the Apple Watch series 1.
The M2/3 is when you’ll see a SoC that is finally designed for laptops and desktop computers and where you would likely see some additional ISA improvements on the CPU and on the GPU side too like hardware Ray Tracing support which will surely come.
Plus, I don't think Apple has really released a "Pro" M1 laptop yet. The current M1 MacBook Pro has max 13 inch screen, max 16 GB RAM, max 2 TB storage, only 2 Thunderbolt/USB ports, only a single external display supported, no external GPU supported.
If I had to guess I'd say they meant to call this just MacBook but tacked on the Pro since they discontinued the non-Pro line entirely.
There can be no real pro M1 yet, I don’t have that much issues with the 16GB limit tho some might people might but the other limitations are really due to SoC itself it doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth to support external GPUs multiple displays and a lot of high bandwidth peripherals.
My own personal theory is that the M1 was not originally designed for laptops it think it was originally intended as an iPad Pro/Pro+ SoC to compete with the higher end Surface devices. This is why likely external GPU support and bandwidth for peripherals wasn’t prioritized, its more than enough for a tablet.
I’m not sure if Apple really expected to get that much performance out of it from the get go, when their early samples did they made a decision to launch a full line including laptops despite the rest of the SoC not being designed for that.
The 13” MBP line has been bifurcated for a couple of years, the M1 replaced the low-end of that line.
The split started when Apple first tried to replace the MacBook Air with the MacBook Pro sans-touchbar (aka the MacBook escape), and the low end Pro hung around even after they reversed course and brought out the new retina Air.
While the M1 is great there are clearly issues to be ironed out even if it’s just the limited bandwidth available for peripherals.
I’m also betting on major GPU upgrades over the next 2 generations.