SharePlay to Mac (I tested audio) is utterly broken. Shockingly so. I just tried it again, and my music isn't paused, yet is stuck at 0:02. Pausing and unpausing it, and the song starts ticking, 0:03, 0:04, and so on, but you can't hear any audio. Pause it again. It goes back to 0:02. Now try this with AirPods connected to your Mac. Connect your iPhone's Apple Music to AirPlay to Mac. The YouTube video you had playing on your Mac gets paused, for no reason. But at least you hear your iPhone's audio on your Mac. Now pickup your iPhone. Your AirPods have now switched to your iPhone, that's still AirPlaying to Mac. You can't hear your music anymore. You reconnect the AirPods to your Mac. You can hear your iPhone music for a few minutes. Suddenly you can't hear anything. Pick up your phone, the volume slider in the Music app went all the way to the left. You can't move the volume slider to the right, like it's frozen; but the song is still playing. You go to Control Center, and finally manage to increase the volume. A minute later, the volume goes to zero again. If you were hoping to compensate for Spotify Connect not being on Apple Music, you'll be disappointed.
Also, Safari has a bug that ignores your setting to not reopen non-private windows, and reopens them anyway, so if that's important to you, you may want to temporarily switch to another browser.
And yes, it still has the "occasionally laggy trackpad cursor" bug on M1 for me.
But other than that, it seems quite a bit faster than Big Sur, and so far (past 2 weeks), very stable on the core stuff.
You get no new advantages, can keep doing the same things (such as using the newest XCode) and all new disadvantages, like the Messages pop up in the upper right now takes 3 clicks to reply to because they collapsed the menu into “more” drop down. Now just extrapolate that to every pop up.
I got forced to upgrade to Big Sur recently and it’s working okay. The Lock Screen is my only issue. It flashes several times and makes me re-enter my password halfway through typing it
This is a bit off topic, but moving up to an M1 macbook pro has been an unmitigated disaster for me, as far as AirPlay goes. (But I am very happy with it otherwise.)
I play my music though an Airport Express at home. It has always been a bit flaky at times, but most of the time, it worked fine. With my M1 mac, though, it pretty much stopped working. If I try, the airplay icon in the Music app turns from blue to black with some sort of error indicator on it. I have gotten it to work a few times, but mostly after a reboot of both the mac and the airport express. And, ironically, once when I wanted to listen to music through headphones, and it played on the airport express instead.
My current solution is to play music from an old iphone 6s, sharing music from the Mac. But it often loses its authorization to share music from the mac, so I have to restart the app and reconnect. This takes time, as it seems to need to download all the metadata from my music library each time. Also, sometimes the volume drops to zero and cannot be moved. This is cured by switching output to the iphone speakers and back to airplay. Not at all a great experience. So now I am looking for a non-apple way to play music at home. Most likely a raspberry pi or something like that.
Seeing the same problem with my M1 Air and Airport. It works from boot until the first time I put the computer to sleep.
Please consider filing a bug report with Apple via Feedback Assistant referencing my feedback FB9723470. Maybe they can figure something out from the logs.
I’ve noticed the cursor on M1 goes really laggy and buggy when you drain the battery to 0% (so it hibernates-ish) and then plug the laptop back in (waking it).
Also, Safari has a bug that ignores your setting to not reopen non-private windows, and reopens them anyway, so if that's important to you, you may want to temporarily switch to another browser.
And yes, it still has the "occasionally laggy trackpad cursor" bug on M1 for me.
But other than that, it seems quite a bit faster than Big Sur, and so far (past 2 weeks), very stable on the core stuff.