Apple have now posted an official article regarding the problems re-installing Big Sur on the new M1 model Macs.
If you get a personalization error when reinstalling macOS on your Mac with Apple M1 chip - Apple Support
I was aware of the above article and issue before I erased my new M1 Mac and specifically upgraded to macOS 11.0.1 before rebooting in to recovery mode and erasing the Mac. Despite the fact I went out of my way to upgrade as advised to 11.0.1 the same problem has occurred and it is currently bricked. I am now trying the various steps supposedly only needed for macOS 11.0 to fix the Mac.
(I needed to reinstall as I had a problem first time around with DEP enrolment.)
Apple have really dropped the ball here.
Apple also need to start thinking hard about the size of macOS installers and the fact that no recovery media is included. Yes in many cases the Recovery HD partition may be sufficient but certainly not all as this case illustrates. Furthermore even though I have a reasonably fast Internet link with no usage cap this is certainly not true for all Apple's customers even in the developed world so having to re-download over the Internet over 12GB of macOS installer potentially multiple times is unacceptable. It is taking me nearly two hours per attempt.
Solutions Apple could consider would be a version of macOS installer burnt in to read-only memory aka a ROM, or including a USB flash drive. The later was briefly used as a means of distributing MacOS in the ancient past.
Clearly macOS is only going to continue to gain bloat making this matter worse. It is already the case that macOS is a huge fatty compared to Linux or even Windows 10. (Admittedly this time around a lot of the excess weight macOS is carrying is due to much of the code being universal binaries.)
