You could save hundreds of $/€/£ buying a Mac with a smaller internal SSD. Is that a good economy, or will you come to regret it? Here are the pros and cons.
Apple silicon
How Apple’s new CPU cores can guess which code to run, and which data to load from memory. How those speculative techniques can be exploited, and should we be worried?
Working with external bootable disks: how to create and add them, ownership and LocalPolicy, how that can be changed, and what happens with errors and failure.
Going deeper into Recovery mode, by setting the correct keyboard, sharing the Data volume with another Mac, using full features in Disk Utility and Safari, and avoiding repairing Home permissions.
Running older macOS, support for Intel apps and kernel extensions, booting from an external drive, Boot Camp and Windows support, cloning, and startup key combinations.
Apple silicon laptops start up (if not asleep) when you open their lid or connect power. Now you can change that behaviour by setting their NVRAM.
How to more than double the speed of a thread run on the E cores, by running another 11 threads at the same time.
Early testing of TB5 SSDs show they do deliver much faster speeds that even USB4 models, although not as high as some claim. But their cache size may limit streaming large amounts of data.
How to create and set up macOS VMs for virtualisers. The structure of a VM, creation and first run explained. How to enhance it, and how to run it in isolation.
How macOS can not only regulate CPU cluster frequencies to control power use, but also moves threads to E cores. This reduces power use of over 50 W to less than 13 W.
The Eclectic Light Company 