I spend 10+ years of my life using irons that run 900M tips and i did lots successful soldering with them too.
It's not so much that 900m itself is shit, you can get the job done with it.
So maybe i should rephrase.
It's that 900M is shit once you have used a really good iron and then go back to it
Most of the irons posted here are shit compared to a genuine 888. I dunno if you ever used a genuine Hakko 888, or even 936, or just clones. And the T18 tips are better than the 900M... both interchangeable. Most hakko T18 clones are not very good. I've used 3 of them and they are not comparable to a genuine 888 in power or ergos or durability or handpiece temperature under heavy use. They range from really bad to just mediocre. None really came close to the real thing.
IOW, "irons that run 900M tips" are not necessarily very good. This is the most cloned station in history, and most of the clones only compete by being made by the lowest bidder and sold for peanuts.
Rossman is another guy who went from Ayou to 951 and thinks the old "hakko" style of iron is crap when he's only ever used a cheap knockoff. If you go from a genuine Hakko 888 to Bakon T12, you would see the Bakon is alright but is inferior in many ways. Plus Rossman leaves his 951 at 840F and replaces a $40.00 tip every month or two (per him) while replacing 1 component per hour, so how good is even the real 951?
I probably do more soldering in a month than Rossman does in a year.
Judging the old style of tips to the newer cartridge tips fine. I would 100% agree the 2 clone T12 stations I used are way better to slightly better than the various 3 clone T18's I've used. But the real Hakko 888 (888 has 17% more power than the 936) is way better than the clone T18/900M stations.
I concur the Bakon is a really good station for $30ish, esp if you only need a few different tips. It has shorter tip to grip blah blah, hot swap, yeah, it's pretty decent. Actually the warm up time is about exactly the same as a genuine 888 with the corresponding tip (neighborhood of 17 seconds). Power and thermal drop/loss is pretty close but not as good as a Hakko 888; i.e., you have to fudge with the temp more often than with the 888 when you are encountering big ground planes or whatnot. In addition to real world use, I have preformed a test and have data that backs that up. Handle temp when under heavy load is way better than the 888, which is one of the only non subjective performance features that is an actual improvement (and likewise, the genuine 888 is way better than all of the clone 900m/T18 stations I have used; some of the clones were a problem, but to me the real 888 is more than good enough in this department; it's a rare job that the handle increases in temp). So for $30, you get a pretty capable station with a light handpiece that is backheavy and has flex in the tip. And you get a nice fold out tin stand for the ultimate in soldering ergonomics.
Also, Bakon is quite possibly the only iron that has a worse UI than the 888, lol. Making adjustments is misery, and there are no user adjustable presets. You get nice 50C increments by default, and whenever you try to make smaller adjustments you will fail and end up jumping to the next 50C preset, guaranteed. I eventually gave up and used the iron way too hot to avoid having to change it. 2 months, I hid my 888 and used this iron, and it works great... for $30 bucks. I have also used a 24V t12 clone, and it performed very similarly to the Bakon. Warm up speed was way faster, but it had the same thermal drop and need to bump up the temps as the Bakon, not quite as good as the old obsolete 888 in real world use or in thermal drop test.
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