Will the dev tools that don't work on M1 chips be fixed next year?

I bought an MBP 16 in January, pretty fully loaded with the max chip, max ram and max gpu at the time, and I cannot recommend you buy this machine or even a newer version of it right now. It’s great, but real battery life is abysmal, it runs very hot, although this has been massively improved by switching from FF to Safari, and I usually have Turbo Booster Pro restricting the cpu to base speed. And, not much uses the GPU. iTerm can, big deal, and Snap Camera does, big deal, but DaVinci Resolve free doesn’t, and neither does Capture Pro or ffmpeg, so it’s all a bit pointless right now. Find a compromise Intel machine for now.

P.S. also: lots of fans.

I'd expect most things to work and have native versions by next year, with the notable exceptions of virtualization software and package managers like Homebrew.

Virtualization software likely will never be fixed if you expect an x86 guests to work. The hardware obviously cannot natively virtualize x86, nor can Rosetta cannot emulate privileged x86 code. x86 Docker images will also not work.

Homebrew itself will probably be ported to ARM by then. However, there will likely be a long tail of packages that won't have ARM builds for some time.

If you rely on docker you won't be able to use it until at least February unless they use a pre-release of go which they haven't say they would do. VM are a no-go too. My guess is that it should be runnable by March/May but still buggy enough to be a pain to work on until the end of the year. So maybe you'd be better off waiting for M2 if it gets released by the end of 2021.

I'll add to the recommendations to steer clear of the 16" MBP. It runs uncomfortably hot for rather menial tasks, and the fan noise is bothersome if you're like me and are used to previous generations that were an order of magnitude quieter (I upgraded from a 2015 MBP whose fans were seldom activated). I also almost always use an external display, and just connecting the monitor (1440p ultrawide) causes the fans to spin up to an audible level every time.

As for the M1 issues, nobody knows except for Apple, but I would expect that most will be solved within the next year. There's a lot of core functionality in that article you posted that I can't imagine staying broken for more than a year.

I think the major pain point is virtualization and/or the need to run Windows. This is my case, so instead of pay full for 16" Macbook Pro, I get a M1 Air and coupled with a small mini-desktop (https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops-and-all-in-ones/thinkc...) that I could access remotely (more cheap for me in the long run that have a cloud instance) I think is a good partial solution.

Yes. The performance/power usage from the M1 is amazing. Developers are jumping to the devices and this will spur dev tools to support the new platform more quickly.

I have a new personal MBP 16” and a work MBP 16”. They are great devices but they run really hot and the fans seem like they’re almost always on.

So, I’m taking a few hundred dollar hit and trading in my MBP 16” for an M1 MBP.

If you do go for the MBP 16”, don’t worry too much. It’s a great device with compatibles lot of expansion options port-wise.

Is this for work or personal projects?

For work I couldn't do without Docker, but for personal projects I don't use it and I'm 100% regretting the MBP 16 I bought in January (which in a vacuum is still a great laptop), because I could now do everything I'm doing on it on a machine that costs half as much and has several times the battery life.

Do you really need all those tools or just a subset? Of those that you need and don’t work yet, have you considered reaching out to the developers for an ETA or priority of the port? People can reply however they want but if the developers of the tools you happen to need don’t write the code, a forum comment won’t amount to much.

With how much that has happened so far so quickly I think basically anything in active development will be working at the least and native at the most in less then a year.

I think the M1 based MBP 16" is going to be very fast, most dev tools will probably catch up by then.

I expect everything to be fixed as well as it can be but Intel will still be more compatible (although slower).