How do they do with staying on and then restarting everything after power off? Can they automatically repower?

I don't have my embedded macbook fully configured but gemini says I can get it to repower itself.

By repower I mean if the power goes out and then returns the machine needs to power on and boot.

I have a couple of older Chromebooks I use in rando locations (basement, shop, car, rv, boat etc). And they are great for that casual scene-specific use. Very much recommend and amazing what you can get for sub $50 easily.

One can create a gmail account like my-robots-73489@gmail.com to sync everything too without touching your main google account. Very handy.

[edit: one thing about the M1 is that it has native h.264 h.265 and prores hardware encoder decoders if you are doing video intake of multiple streams]