After further research, it may be a M1-specific issue rather than a Studio specific issue.
I’m not 100% clear on the details, but it appears that Apple only wants to trust devices that were factory signed on M1 machines. It may be possible to boot from an external SSD (my original goal, so everything is in one place, very simple) if I’m willing to degrade my security settings and possibly make other changes. I’m fuzzy on the details, and certainly not a domain expert in any form of IT security much less Apple Security, so even if I think I’ve developed an understanding of the situation I’m not sure if I’ll be willing to make the necessary changes.
I think the TL;DR is: if you are planning on buying an Apple Silicon Mac, then get as much storage space built in as you think you might possibly ever need, unless you are already sufficiently knowledgable to disregard this advice.
The only different I can think of is the home folder is created when the user account is created at 1st login. The folder isn’t moved from a mac originally.
not defending apple here but you are comparing USB 3.2 drive to an onboard ssd, this is not a fair comparison, this is a much lower spec drive, if you want to compare drives I think you should take a look at the Samsung X5 Thunderbolt drive, which costs $600 for 2TB, and I believe that an onboard drive will have better performance and longevity.
personally I actually think that performance-wise their SSD’s are reasonably priced, IF you need that performance, if you don’t need performance but simply storage then personally I would only symlink internal folders and nothing from the first level of your ~/.
anyway, losing files sucks ass, but can’t say that didn’t happen to me on other machines and OS’s, I remember breaking debian install on encrypted ssd and trying to mount it on another system to recover stuff, nightmare to remember… I’ve lost enough data to get a NAS with RAID1 for the Time Machine to back up everything I need.
I know that if I loose data today, I can only blame myself. always back up important stuff.
consider the new mini’s, they are specc’d pretty good now and much cheaper, less ports of course but otherwise you’ll be able to get up to 32gb ram and larger drive for less $$…
I stand corrected - you are probably right about performance, I’m not sure about longevity. The deep dives that I’ve read suggest the lifetime of the SSDs on the MBPs may be much shorter than commercially available alternatives, but perhaps the Studio’s drive(s) are designed differently.
My core problem is that Apple is explicitly treating my machine as e-Waste. There is no official or unofficial upgrade path. Despite the fact that all tear downs suggest that the proprietary modules are physically removable.
can’t argue with that as I don’t know enough, it’s just common sense to me that something onboard will live longer then something external, but maybe I’m wrong here.
not sure they would recycle it, I think they’ll wipe it and resell it as refurbished, I think they recycle only what’s not currently selling and the studios are still selling. maybe the support rep told you that but not sure that they would just recycle operating machine they can resell. but yeah, I get your point.