PERockwell

Sorry to deisappoint those that suspect a conspiracy to inflate Apple's profits, but the same research will tell you that Apple has change the boot process for security purposes.

Bootable backups can still be made, just not with the ASR tool. Mike Bombich (Carbon Copy Cloner) has been warning of this situation for years because of the undocumented nature of ASR and Apple's stance on cloning the operating system.

Mike made a blog post about this over 3 years ago t https://bombich.com/blog/2021/05/19/beyond-bootable-backups-adapting-recovery-strategies-evolving-platform).  
A significant quote from that blog:

Back in December I had a conference call with Apple about the reliability and functionality of ASR on macOS and regarding Apple Silicon Macs in particular. They indicated that they were working to resolve the ASR/Apple Fabric issue, but they made it very clear that copying macOS system files was not something that would be supportable in the future. Many of us in the Mac community could see that this was the direction Apple was moving, and now we finally have confirmation. Especially since the introduction of APFS, Apple has been moving towards a lockdown of macOS system files, sacrificing some convenience for increased security.

If you've done your research, you can find that bootable external disks can still be made, but your best method of doing so (recommended by a number of sources) is to create a data-volume only duplicate to the external disk, then perform a macOS installation to the external disk.  See Install macOS on an external storage device and use it as a startup disk and make-a-ventura-bootable-external-disk-for-an-apple-silicon-mac (I'm sure there are others)...

The only wrinkle is because of the security architecture of Apple Silicon Macs -- they won't boot at all if the internal SSD fails. 

 nubus said:

Apple is "we sold you an iPhone so you can only buy apps from us and we have placed a 43% tax on developers". 

Nice use of how to use numbers to fit a narrative.  Take the markup and use that as a percentage of the developer's proceeds and use that to inflate the percentage and call it a tax. I guess that any markup by a retailer over the wholesale transaction cost would be considered by your calculations to be  a "tax" on the wholesale price..  

svencito said:

The only thing I'm waiting for is the 27-inch sibling. 23.5' just won't do it for me.

I'm afraid you'll be waiting for quite a while. Apple has said they have no plans to re-introduce that product.  

If you need that much real estate,  a M4 Mac mini with a 27" or larger monitor of your choice might be the best option.  If the new mini is as rumored, it'll take up less disk space than the current model (which is fairly small itself).

When running OCLP, installing any macOS updates (including security updates) without OCLP confirming that it supports them risks breaking your Mac. Thats why the tecommendation to turn off automatic updates, which is a terrible security practice.  That means you may face a delay in remediating security issues until the developers “catch up” with Apple updates. 

Also note that in the majority of cases OCLP disables some of the built-in security related features of mavOS. Your OCLP Mac is not as secure as a stock macOS implementation. 

softeky said:

It is still the case that Parallels runs Intel code but VMWare does not. Linux is certainly stable enough on both  Intel and ARM architectures, running in both Parallels and VMWare virtual hosting environments, but I'll have to spend some time seeing how much Windows-ARM has improved in VMWare as Windows-Intel still appears to only be an option in Parallels.

Parallels DID NOT and DOES NOT run Intel operating systems on Apple Silcon Macs. See https://kb.parallels.com/en/124223 where it clearly states that Intel operating systems only run on Intel Macs. VMware Fusion and Parallels both require ARM operating systems when running on Apple Silicon Macs.