I know there is an issue with being able to run any intel-chip based software (OS) on the M1/2 hardware. I have multiple pieces of software that are critical to my business that don't run on anything past El Capitan. Does anyone know if this is an issue with an eventual solution, or are we dead in the water on being able to emulate Intel systems on the M1 hardware?
Not really a solution - but maybe the following report of my experience gives you an idea about possible options: I'm a freelancer in the editorial realm, and for one of my major customers I still have to use InDesign CS 5.5 and an accompanying CMS, which are both well 10 years old today. I have solved this by running a virtualized MacOS Mavericks under Parallels on my former Mac mini. Obviously, this path would be blocked when changing to Mac Silicon. On the other hand, I did not want to miss out on the clearly higher performance of Apple's new hardware for the other 60 or 70 per cent of what I'm doing every day. So I ended up switching to a Mac Studio, installing Parallels on an Intel Macbook Pro and run the legacy environment there. For convenience, I access the MacBook Pro from the Mac Studio via screen sharing. This works generally quite well (however, in my case I observed that I wanted to use an 8-core i9, with four cores for the VM and four cores for the host for this setup to run really smoothly). Getting files to and from the virtual environment always meant to transfer them via Parallel's host access - so this did not really get more complicated than before. Maybe my solution means a little hardware overkill, but for me it seemed like the best choice.
Honestly not a bad solution, and a used intel Mac won't really break the bank in most situations. I keep my 2018 MBP around for being able to run legacy Windows images - 10, Server, etc. - for work. Trending very quickly toward not needing it anymore though, and I couldn't be happier about that fact because my 16" M1 Max makes it feel like a graphing calculator in terms of speed.
This is the one setback of my current setup. When I need the legacy environment on the road, I am stuck with the Intel MBP. Having had a taste of what working on an M1/M2 feels like (in addition to the Mac Studio we also have an M2 MBA, more or less as a surfing and e-mail machine), this hurts a little. However, does not play a huge role at the moment, as I don't do a lot of heavy business traveling these days. But this is a limitation that I am aware of.
The problem with this is that it may buy yourself a year or two but eventually things break and become forced into obsolescence. Prime example is my early 2013 MBP running Catalina, which has finally run it's course: I've already replaced the battery once, the keyboard keys don't work very well, and not worth the cost to replace. Even the power button is worn to the point where if I shut it down it has to be auto-woken at a certain time, otherwise I have to pop the bottom off and do the battery disconnect thing in order to restart it. Homebrew and other major apps such as Turbo Tax have even officially stopped supporting Catalina and no newer macOS will install on it. I have thought about looking for a more recent, used (or even new) Intel-based MBP but again will be spending quite a bit of money for something that yet again will be obsolete in only a few short years. Seriously look at the prices of these things before considering buying used. So, I'm biting the bullet and am ordering an M1 box sometime within in the next month. Seeing how there's no way I'm updating my other VMs to an ARM architecture along with it I've also purchased a stand-alone Intel-based laptop (Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 7, to be exact) to off-load my Win11 and Fedora VMs in a dual boot fashion like the old days... It'll be a pain having two boxes again, something I haven't done in 15 years since Parallels Desktop 3, but I personally don't see any other way.
