> So, for a lot of engineers, the M1 is the better choice over Intels.
I don't know which engineers you hang out with, but the only "engineer" I know who uses an M1 Mac does web design. Besides that, the M1 doesn't support most of the software that most engineers are using (unless you're working in a field already focused on ARM), and the fragility of a Macbook isn't really suited for a workshop environment. Among them, Thinkpads still reign supreme (though one guy has a Hackintosh, so maybe you were right all along?)
> But I wonder if the M1 will solidify or grow Apple's (perceived) dominance among developers?
Developers are going to be extremely split on this one. ARM is still in it's infancy right now, especially for desktop applications, so unless your business exclusively relies on MacOS customers, there's not much of a value proposition in compiling a special version of your program for 7% of your users. Because of that, MacOS on ARM has one of the worst package databases in recent memory. Besides, there's a lightning round full of other reasons why MacOS is a pretty poor fit for high-performance computing:
- BSD-styled memory management causes frequent page faults and thrashes memory/swap
- Quartz and other necessary kernel processes consume inordinate amounts of compute
- MacPorts and Brew are both pretty miserable package managers compared to the industry standard options.
- Macs have notoriously terrible hardware compatability
- Abstracting execution makes it harder to package software, harder to run it, and harder to debug it when something goes wrong
...and many more!
In other words, I doubt the M1 will do much to corroborate Apple's perceived superiority among the tech-y crowd. Unless people were really that worried about Twitter pulling up a few dozen milliseconds faster, I fail to see how it's any better of an "engineering" laptop than it's alternatives. If anything, it's GPU is significantly weaker than most other laptops on the market.