Thanks JOe,

I had a VERY VERY bad experience with icloud messing up timestamps and spent of time with apple tech, hence, never again use icloud for except bare minimum.
(granted if never had that experience I'd be gung ho) If have it once, your done with icloud forever trust me... Hours and Hours of grief.... BTW remember I stilll have Crashplan, so I had it all in some lcoud.. and the Bank, is just if robbery, so have BAse replacement...... Cloud would take months to download 4 TB.

Great post on that paragraph about computers evolving.

Ok so your answer is get as much in the internal SSD as you can? Darn, had I known this month ago I would have ordered a 2TB internal, Did not know, and of COUrse, of course, for first time ever buying a new Mac -- you CANNOT UPGRADE. funny right?

OH well.

"The beach ball "on iCloud Finder..." is the result of the inescapable delay created by your internet connection to the iCloud drive and independent of any I/O issues with local drives.
Question on that one Joe: But that did not happen ever in 6 years on the imac 27"..

Big new info:

Today had totally unrelated meeting with expert Photoshop printing and mentioned the M1 Beachball, and he asked, "Did you use migration assistant?"

He said he had all same crazy things happen with Photoshop and more, migrating over. He said tons of stuff wrecks havoc bringing over from Intel to Silicon and he gets many calls from others saying same thing. Recommendation was same as J, Etracheck: Clean install.

IN short nothing else really fixes the beachball.... JUst clear, migrating from INtel to M1.. big issues. Funny how nothing online or no Apple tech know about that... or mention it much.

That said: in my mind, if do it: then just screenshot every app and every setting I've made, ir workspace, docks etc etc etc, and then don't bring anything over at all, which is SO tempting to do, I can't even fathom amount of stuff right now that would have to be redone. But you agree, the key if do that is to RECREATE everything one keystroke at a time. The one thing kill me is Word Style I have. Have not done those in years. Would not even know how. ... Macros etc....And workspaces, and accounts.. etc etc... ANY other warnings on that? But you agree if do it, don't give into temptatioin to drag over a preference or some folder with old workspace, styles , macro, keyboard shortcut... redo it all.