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

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131–135 of 135 posts

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

#132
Up until it died, the MacBook was super nice to work on, super fast in waking from sleep, and pleasant to use in all lighting conditions except direct sunlight obliquely incident to the screen (in which case the sunlight made all the dust and fingerprints on the screen extremely bright and opaque).

Obviously I can't run my intel-based VMs, but I was able to run all my web development toolchains: Django, Vuex/Flask, PHP, Postgres/MySQL/SQLite.

I also play games: mostly KSP. The 8GB RAM isn't enough for a small KSP save (a dozen flights, a few hundred parts), and I had to restart KSP every couple of hours due to memory pressure.

Best computer I've ever owned, but I've already killed one inside two weeks of owning it and the replacement is going out the same way: something in my environment or in the way I use it caused the M1 to kill itself.

It starts off as the occasional panic/reboot. Continues to manifest as any activity that requires touching the disk ends up locking the computer up for tens of seconds (spinning beachball cursor, but you can't move the cursor with trackpad or external mouse). Ultimately the MacBook just dies in the middle of whatever it was you were doing, and nothing you or the Apple Genius can do will convince it to boot again.

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

#133
I don’t use my MacBook Air M1 for development, but I believing positive reinforcement so I need to add to all praise here, who knows someone from Apple sees it.

This machine is so super nice. The keyboard is awesome, the dedicated emoji button is useful. But the cherry on top is insane performance and insane battery life.

To me, this machine is to other laptops as the iPhone was to all smartphone before it.

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

#134
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worth reading a bit about sshuttle. It basically leverages ssh into a simple one way VPN as far as ergonomics and user experience go (but the underlying implementation is closer to opening LocalForward connections on demand). Highly recommended.

Almost as easy: just setup a point to point WireGuard tunnel. I used sshuttle for remote Docker dev for a while, but found that WireGuard way outperforms it.

sshuttle is definitely no efficiency daemon - however, it only requires being able to ssh to the other side, amd run Python there, and that’s it - whereas for Wireguard you need root on the other side, a sufficiently new kernel (or building an out of kernel module) - it’s way better if you can use it but IME it isn’t “almost as easy” - sshuttle usually just works if you can ssh.

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

#135
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many hours of battery life do you get when doing programming?

I tend to have it plugged in while writing code so I can use a larger external display, but so far the most battery drain I’ve had with it was getting at best just shy of 9-10 hours when I wired up a Club3D DP 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 adapter and output HDR10 at native 4K resolution. That really started to chew through the battery, especially when running Dolby Vision content through Netflix in Safari. I ended up buying USB-C…

Hi! I am looking to purchase an M1 Air, but I would like to know first if it will work with my LG CX55OLED at 4K@120Hz. Can you confirm if it works in 4K120Hz resolution and refresh rate? Also what is the specific type of the Club3D adapter and the adapter you use to convert TB3 to DisplayPort?

Thanks!

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