> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.

Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.

"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.

[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.