Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks Booting from an external SSD with an M1 Mac

Earlier today, I saw this:

https://www.macworld.com/article/3608433/how-to-start-up-your-m1-mac-from-an-external-drive.html

I don't have an M1 Mac (at least not yet), but thought I would post this for folks that have such a Mac. Thunderbolt 3 external SSDs are not cheap, and also the need to have Big Sur installed on such an SSD seems "clunky". And of course Carbon Copy Cloner cannot work "easily" with M1-based Macs (still no "easy" solution for SuperDuper!).

I've been thinking about getting a M1 MacBook Air, but with all those hassles, and also some serious software incompatibilities, looks like I'll wait a while.

Personally I have to wonder if the ASR (clone) issue and the pickiness creating a bootable external drive on M1 Macs are not related. I have no way of testing ASR at the moment but I will take Apple's word that it doesn't work, and given that in order to install a bootable version of macOS 11 on an external drive requires a very specific set of conditions leads me to wonder if it would be possible to successfully create a bootable clone under lesser conditions/constraints?