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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?

#41

Post by robotcookies »

rock_artist wrote: post #37

I’ve been using MacBook Air. Battery life - I had bigger expectations :) , it’s indeed nice but still seems to run off quicker than reviews and reports I have read. Compiling - that’s where it really chimes. I actually get better build times than my desktop 10700k machine (both with Xcode 12.2 and compiling same archs. The hiccups, As we develop audio plug-ins (which are dlls). it seems that Apple now has extra XPC s…

I had considered asking this from a web developer/node perspective. But I increasingly do other things like run different databases, golang, etc so I left it open-ended for that reason.

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

#42

Post by zarkov99 »

sz4kerto wrote: post #34

VSCode remote plugin + a Linux server in the other room with dual Xeon and 64G RAM + Tailscale mesh VPN. Perfect for my use cases.

That is roughly how I use it, except is ssh'd into an Emacs session. Even though I am not a fan of MacOS, I love the M1 air. Great keyboard, always cool, battery runs for days.

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

#44

Post by photokandy »

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?

My perspective: Going from a 2019 15" MacBook Pro with 16GB of memory to an 8GB M1 13" MacBook Pro

You don't start to feel the 8GB until you:

* have a lot of tabs open in Safari (like ~30+)

* have heavy web apps (GMail & Outlook, I'm looking at you)

* run a virtual machine (Only so much you can give a Parallels instance w/ 8GB)

* run some known performance & memory hogs (Slack, Teams, etc.)

* vpn seems to slow things down a bit

I generally will close down apps when I don't need them (but that's _always_ been my habit). I do find the M1 to be fully sufficient (and still faster than my previous MBP) when doing my day-to-day (including VS Code, JIRA, Slack, Xcode, Node, etc.). I also use my M1 for music performance and composition, and that's worked just fine for my purposes (but so did the previous MBP). I will (as I did before) switch contexts by closing apps I don't need, so it's hard to say if apps from development impact the apps for music or not; they rarely run side-by-side.

Things that have greatly improved my productivity:

* This thing is as cool as a cucumber, and absolutely sips its battery. This means I can be more comfortable taking my MBP to the couch, or to the patio (when it was warm) and not worry about watching the battery %.

* This thing _in general_ is much snappier. Native apps load quickly, and performance in the apps I use is about twice that of the previous MBP.

* I can type on this keyboard!

* Using a single external monitor is fine; I work from a couple of locations, and both my Dell P2415Q and my LG 24MD4KL-B 24" Ultrafine 4K work fine.

There are edge cases here where the M1 falls short:

* I can slow the poor thing to a crawl for a few seconds if I attach a 4K monitor and then try to AirPlay to another 4K display. It catches back up and is generally fine after, but you see the beachball for a while.

* Lots of tabs in Safari will cause slow tab switching, and some web sites just chew through CPU. Battery life is still _way_ better than the previous MBP, but it definitely impacts the feel of the device.

* Bluetooth mice -- ugh. I bought a Logitech MX ergo and had to switch to using the receiver instead because the MBP bluetooth felt so laggy.

* Most iOS apps just aren't well suited for the device. Apollo (for Reddit) works pretty well, but even that has its quirks where sometimes keyboard shortcuts will just stop working.

* VMs. If you run Windows in Parallels, you _will feel it_. I do not run VMs all the time for this reason, but spin them up and down as needed.

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

#45

Post by terhechte »

- I had some trouble building the Rust lang toolchain (wanted to work on a PR), haven't tried again (used my other machine instead).

- The battery life is great.

- Something I wouldn't have thought is how much I enjoy that the machine is not heating up under stress. Difficult to describe, but that is really really nice

- I have the MBP and the only time I heard the fan was when I compiled the Rust toolchain.

- Tried to run Linux in Parallels but that didn't work (some sort of weird error, didn't investigate further)

- Within Xcode/Swift everything works as expected, just much faster ;)

- My M1 has problems when I'm connecting my external 5K display. It works great, but when I put the M1 to sleep and wake it up again it can't find the display anymore. Even plugging it in / out doesn't help. I read somewhere that that'll soon be fixed with a software update.

- I had higher hopes for the ability to run iOS apps. I really wanted Netflix and Amazon Alexa to work. I hope they'll reverse their stance to not support M1s at some point.

Overall, I'm very happy with the M1, but I still have a 2018 Mac mini that continues to be my main machine. I bought the M1 because I have an upcoming Mac app that I've worked on for ~2 years and I wanted to make sure it works on M1 (https://hyperdeck.io).

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

#47

Post by photokandy »

coding123 wrote: post #3

No OP but looking for people with any reactions on using Docker, Node or Python on the M1? Likely going to get an M1 mini at some point.

Native Node is fine, and generally runs better than the equivalent MBP. My 8GB M1 handles Node & JS about twice as fast as my 16GB 15" Intel MBP from 2019.

Where you can run into issues is architecture support. I'm running Node natively, but this means that some packages that don't support ARM will fail to build properly. I've been able to work around/do without for now, but depending on your use case, it could be an issue, if you want to run Node natively. (I do not have a feel for Node via Rosetta 2 performance.)

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

#48

Post by lstamour »

jeffbee wrote: post #13

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.

Maybe https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/apple-m1/ is worth a shot, it can also emulate amd64 images - and because it’s Docker for Mac, it uses Linux either way.

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

#49

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

cordite wrote: post #19

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 w…

I’m so frustrated by what apple has done with externals in the last few iterations, especially displays. I am an outlier in that I use three external displays, and my current MacBook can just barely support it if I make sure to spread my devices over separate usb-c dongles. If I try to put keyboard, mouse, power, and monitor on a single advertised as supporting multiple USB and power and HDMI, the keyboard and especially mouse stop working correctly, even with “just” two external monitors. I thought things were moving in a direction where I’d have one hub/dock I plug all my peripherals into, leaving one cord to plug into the laptop, but now I have a maze of dongles I have to load balance!

I don’t mind what they did on phones with the headphone jack, because they provided an excellent alternative. On MacBooks, they just take away ports without a solid replacement.

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

#50

Post by qwantim1 »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #36
ericol wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Not for video editing, and unfortunately the 2014 Mac mini doesn't allow upgrading the ram

You could maybe add an eGPU or add faster and bigger drive(s) for virtual memory.

Also some info about 2014 Mac Mini memory at: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/mac-mini-aluminu... and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041#two

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