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Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?

#11

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

Also M1 owners, I would also like to know how much 8/16 GB memory has affected your workflow/productivity assuming you previously had at least 32GB RAM?

e.g. Those who never closed their apps before, kept several browsers with several dozen tabs, Note taking apps, IDE, VM etc. all the time.

Is lighting fast opening of apps on M1 = Never having to close the apps in any machine with large RAM?

Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?

#12

Post by vgchh »

lddemi wrote: post #8

So far have been very happy :) Still waiting on native VS Code but rosetta works fine. Recently after several big apps like Chrome, iTerm and Slack updated to native binaries everything has been _very_ smooth. I use docker heavily with zero issues - arm64 or amd64.

You can now get the insider build for VS Code that runs natively on M1: https://code.visualstudio.com/insiders/

Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?

#13

Post by jeffbee »

It's a great little machine. I've been sticking with Go, C++ (with CMake, mostly) and JS in the browser. The worst problem for me so far has been that getting bazel to work properly has been a bigger job than anticipated. Its belief that macos implies x86_64 turns out to be hard-wired all over the place.

Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?

#14

Post by nickjj »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #11

Also M1 owners, I would also like to know how much 8/16 GB memory has affected your workflow/productivity assuming you previously had at least 32GB RAM? e.g. Those who never closed their apps before, kept several browsers with several dozen tabs, Note taking apps, IDE, VM etc. all the time. Is lighting fast opening of apps on M1 = Never having to close the apps in any machine with large RAM?

While I don't have an M1 and I use Windows I did make a video the other week around the topic of what it's like doing full time web development / ops work / 1080p video creation with 16GB of RAM.

That video is at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/for-the-time-being-16gb-of-ra...

The TL;DR is 16GB holds up really nicely in most cases. That's also with running WSL 2 which is something you wouldn't need to do on macOS so in theory memory usage should be even more efficient on macOS.

Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?

#15

Post by youngdynasty »

vgchh wrote: post #12
lddemi wrote: post #8

So far have been very happy :) Still waiting on native VS Code but rosetta works fine. Recently after several big apps like Chrome, iTerm and Slack updated to native binaries everything has been _very_ smooth. I use docker heavily with zero issues - arm64 or amd64.

You can now get the insider build for VS Code that runs natively on M1: https://code.visualstudio.com/insiders/

Not all extensions work yet, unfortunately. C++ wasn’t usable, last time I tried.

Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?

#19

Post by cordite »

I got mine this week, I'm surprised it doesn't even blow hot air while building node from source.

However, I am greatly disappointed in the fact that I cannot use both usb-c for displays, only one of them. I did not know of this limitation until I discovered things were not working as expected.

Everything is super responsive, it's far better than the 2014 mac mini (4GB of ram) with 2020 SSD.

Rosetta 2 seems to work without any hitches so far.

I tried running some iOS apps, but it seems the ones available don't run all that well. From the ones I could install, it is nice to receive app notifications!

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