I see that the M1 Mac Mini is only available with 8GB RAM. Is that likely to remain as a market segmentation thing, or could a 16GB Mini be available soonish?
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Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
21–30 of 135 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
#22I was literally just coming on here to ask this question! Specifically, whether or now homebrew is happy with the m1.
homebrew mostly works, but if something depends on java or openjdk or whatever (like sbt) it tries to build it for x64.
If you have the arm64 openjdk installed from Azul, you can edit out the dependency from the cask and it works fine.
Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
#23VMs work. Qemu is working with patches. You have to build it though. None of the releases seems to be patched yet. There is an early preview of Parallels. Both Linux and Windows on Arm are working. Docker has an early release as well. There are few prebuilt projects on Github too:
https://github.com/evansm7/vftool
Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
#24Also 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?
TL;DR: 16GB is enough for most use cases on Intel Macs, so it should be as good or better on M1 Macs.
In my experience with 16GB Intel Macs for years, I have never had memory problems. I'm sure there are some large data migration cases which could make it a problem, but for my typical development (1-3 instances of a JetBrains IDE open, PostgreSQL and MySQL servers running, Docker running, sometimes even VirtualBox running, half a dozen or more terminal sessions, 1-5 Rails apps running - all of these simultaneously) I have been fine with 16GB.
If anything does start to create memory pressure, it's usually Chrome or Firefox after they've been open for weeks (since my laptop uptimes are usually 30-90 days), with far too many tabs open.
Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
#25Also 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?
I have laptops with 64 and 32Gb of RAM, but I found my best work happens with 8Gb of RAM.
I can't exactly explain how or why, but it seems to enforces discipline by reducing task (and context) switching - so much that I got myself another laptop with 4Gb.
Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
#26I got the air(8GB RAM), and I had to go through some special work around, like 1 day or two for setting up my environment(React native dev), and compile time has been almost the same as my desktop - i5 8th gen 16 RAM 250gb ssd even though it's working under rosetta 2
Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
#27I 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 w…
> it's far better than the 2014 mac mini (4GB of ram) with 2020 SSD
Can you explain this a little better? I have a MAc Mini 2014 lying around that never got to put to good use (I inherited it when my father died) and one of my daughters tried to use for video editing but deciding against because of the memory limitations.
Would you say even thought with the little RAM it is still good?
Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
#28I think it'll be another month or two at least before doing scientific programming will be pleasant due to the lack of support from e.g. numpy and hacked versions of gfortran being used for R.
Are there any quality lapack/atlas libraries available?
Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
#29Gosh I love it so much. I’ve been doing golang and c/c++ on it and everything is buttery smooth. Few hiccups in the beginning with Rosetta but making sure I just run terminal with it ticked on makes everything fine. Once the Firefox M1 support came, I was very pleased. Everything is snappy, quiet, and light. I’d much rather trade in my mid-2019 16” rmbp for another of these at home. Battery life is amazing. 16gb hasn’t been an issue for me ever; it makes me actually question if the OS is just better at managing memory more recently; that being said I don’t do any AV workloads which would necessitate more RAM over programming tasks.
I am wanting to get virtualbox running though
Re: Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?
#30I had mine for over a month now and it’s great. Development is fast there is some libraries that are not compiled for M1 yet so if you use package managers like brew etc it might need to compile some libraries from source. But once everything is installed running code is extremely quick. You can have 100s of browser tabs without a noticeable drop in performance, I use a MacBook Air M1.