I order the M1 Mac Mini the week they released I knew I was going to have to return my Apple Transition Kit and plus I did not want to continue paying $100 a month for the kit. I order the M1 Mac Mini with 8 gigs of ram and a 500 gig hard drive. I know the ram is not upgradable but for me, this was the price point. I do not use the Mac Mini for much besides testing code and doing some bill paying so I do not need anything high end plus I just got the 2019 MacBook Pro 16 inch so for me this was perfect.
After using the M1 Mac Mini for a while I will say it’s a great machine. I have recorded a few podcasts with it and GarageBand runs great even with 8 gigs of ram. Microsoft Office specifically Word and Excel are two programs I use a lot and while at the beginning I needed to run Rosetta both apps have native M1 support.
As far as browsers go which is something, I use a lot on the Mac Mini Chrome has M1 support and Safari runs really fast which you would expect on an Apple product. Microsoft Edge finally added M1 support and so did Firefox.
The other apps I use are the Apple Mail app, Spotify, Apple News, Calendar, Remote Desktop, Any Desk, Sublime Text, and WhatsApp which all work fine on the M1. I have had a few issues Google Drive is not supported yet and neither is VirtualBox.
I can honestly say that Apple Apps are really fast on the M1 processors and you would expect that from Apple on their own platform.
For me, the M1 is not that big of an issue plus I have an Intel MacBook Pro if you are thinking of getting an M1 Mac check if your software is compatible before you buy at https://isapplesiliconready.com