I'm really curious about this deterioration? I use a M1 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM as my primary machine and it still runs fine. I do iOS development so it's not exactly fast but I wouldn't call it slow by any word.
My Poor M1 Mini though is struggling though but that's b/c I'm running it as home server and 8 GB RAM is not enough anymore.
Curious about the choice of the Mac as a home server. I feel like an off-lease x86 usff pc, at roughly half the cost, would be more useful as a server. Pre-RAM-crisis you could get one with 32GB of RAM for like $240. My main home server is one of those HP ProDesk, running Debian.
Interoperability between my server and working dev system was a perk that I'm willing to pay the apple premium for. I can run Linux on the server but then I have to deal with running Linux and if I want to develop something locally instead of having to ssh into my machine it's nice.
The cheaper PCs don't have strong graphic cards which I needed to run Plex and hardware transcoding and other few ML tasks that I occasionally do but that was only a smaller factor.
Nowadays, it's even more important b/c I refuse to keep an AI model on my mac mini in case it gets compromised.
Ah. Especially once you're doing an AI model that makes plenty of sense.
For non-AI, non-AAA gaming needs, I was able to get an RX560 GPU module[1] for my EliteDesk, which I use for Minecraft (It is mutually exclusive with its 2.5" HDD/SSD bay, but I just have an nvme drive in that).
I had to upgrade from an M1 Pro with 16 GB to an M4 Pro with 24 GB last year because one of my work projects at the time needed multiple docker instances, and 16 GB wasn't enough. This year 24 GB isn't enough for a few AI models, but there's no budget for an upgrade...
My home "servers" don't do much but 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM is enough them, for now (Linux).
My Poor M1 Mini though is struggling though but that's b/c I'm running it as home server and 8 GB RAM is not enough anymore.