The most commonly cited limitation I've heard is a max of 16GB RAM on the current M1 Macbooks. The limitation of a single external monitor is probably the second most common.
A lot of users would like to run multiple external monitors and have > 16GB of RAM. I know I'm in that group.
* Limited IO
* Max 16GB Memory ( at unjustified cost )
* Limited Multi monitor support
* No eGPU support ( as of now )
* Only about 50 a 55% of all the software is M1 ready ( looking at some tracking sites ). Technically this is not a M1 flaw but you need something to push the market/iron out the bugs. While when the M2 gets introduced, you may be at 60 or 70%. As in less likely to run into issues as the M1 users are the real beta testers. Even Parallels only recently got good M1 support ( with massive speed increases ).
As of this moment, buying a M1 laptop is a less beta tester feature then it was several months ago. If you ended up buying in Nov/Dec, you spend a lot of time under Rosetta 2 or dealing with issues.
> I haven’t read many negative reviews.
The above was kind of always overglanced by a lot of the reviews, as the youtubers mostly looked at their own us for video editing etc and there most software was on point very early in the release cycle.
You see a lot of reviews in Jan/Feb from people going back to Windows laptops after a month, not because of the CPU being bad but because they ran into software issues.
In the mean time the software situation has evolved a lot more but the progresses with software being made M1 ready has also slowed down a lot.
As a PC user i want a M1 like laptop, that has long battery life, is silent and still powerful ( unlike a lot of Windows laptops where its always the old saying: Pick 2, you can never have all 3 ).
But i prefer one with 8 performance cores, double the iGPU cores ( with preferably DDR5 ) for light gaming and standard 16GB. So some macBook 16 Pro or whatever, if the price is not insane. We shall see what Apple introduces...
So far the new offerings from AMD and Intel are fast but still power hungry and heat generating ( aka fan noise! ). AMD is only going little.big in 3nm.
Intel's alder lake may be a M1 competitor ( for battery life under light loads ) but its again first generation product so expect to be a beta tester until Windows gets fine tuned for a long time to properly use the little cores! For heavy loads, ... well, 10nm is 10nm, no matter how many +++ you add.
In the case of CPU architecture switches, Apple's gone with the same strategy every time so far: switch out the guts, keep the outside design. So maybe not negative reviews regarding the CPU, just a bit boring design.
I disagree with OP though, not second, but third generations have been the one to get for me: iPod 3rd gen, iPhone 4, Apple Watch Series 3. OK, iPad 3 was a bit of a failure, but still, first retina.
It would be fine for 98% of the things I do but I still need to do that 2%. With the x86 CPUs I always had virtualization with USB pass through as a final workaround solution but with the M1 there are things I absolutely can' do.
I haven’t read many negative reviews.