Help Drew Bruggman Repair His Mac for iOS Development

Hi, I'm Drew Bruggman and I'm a recent computer science grad that's trying to break into the job market and build my portfolio. Part of that portfolio is developing mobile apps, which means I need to have the ability to develop for iOS (Mac/iPhone).

For those not in the know: Mac is very exclusive about access to their operating system and their share of the market in general. While it's possible to do development for Windows while working on a Mac, it's not possible to do Mac development while working on a Windows machine. Even if you produce something, you need a Mac to sign the finished product in order for it to actually go up on the apple store.

I'd bought an M1 mac while a student at CSUS, hoping to gain access to the iOS development environment. It worked wonderfully for most of my time at CSUS. During my senior year at CSUS, however, my M1 Macbook Pro died - later, looked online and it's a common issue with this model:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254839028

I'd gone through all of the suggested fixes at the time, and none of them worked; I was also a few months past warrantee.

Eventually, I took the machine into the local Apple store to get it looked at. They took it for a couple days, then I came back to grab it after receiving a message saying it had been fixed. While in the store, the genius brought it out to show that it was working, but the original issue happened again when he tried to turn it on - black screen after startup logo faded. He took it back for a bit, then returned and told me it was a hardware issue and it would cost $700. I asked if I could just trade it in or something like that, and he said it couldn't be traded in because it wasn't functional.

I did have a job in industry right after graduating earlier this year, but restructuring led to layoffs, and I was laid off a couple months ago. Since then, money's been tight. The job market around computer science is pretty atrocious right now, and if you look, there are horror stories everywhere about people being unable to secure a job for months - sometimes over a year.

Freelancing is one of the few reliable available avenues for securing work at the moment, and while I have experience developing for Android, most jobs involving mobile development want a solution that will work for both Android AND iOS, which means I'm unable to bid on those jobs.

Please help me repair my laptop so I can start building up my mobile development portfolio and secure work.