Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
doordash.engineering
Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
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Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#2Essential for any development occurring on a Mac IMO. I upgraded from a fully specced out 16inch to a base model M1 with the 32GB upgrade (a machine roughly half the price I think) and it's night and day. I can use Docker now without Slack getting laggy.
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#3Essential for any development occurring on a Mac IMO. I upgraded from a fully specced out 16inch to a base model M1 with the 32GB upgrade (a machine roughly half the price I think) and it's night and day. I can use Docker now without Slack getting laggy.
I guess the new benchmark for development is can it run Slack? (While developing)
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#4One thing that is surprisingly slow on the M1 is running an OpenGL ES application in the simulator.
I developed a game on a shoestring budget, and hoped that an M1 would be able to be used for capturing video of the game at the resolutions that Apple wants, but it was way too slow to be able to do this, so I had to just leave video out of my store page.
The same app run on your M1 mac with its iOS compatibility works completely fine (as it should, it is a 2d game with about 10 sprites that just get drawn with scaling and no rotation).
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#5Essential for any development occurring on a Mac IMO. I upgraded from a fully specced out 16inch to a base model M1 with the 32GB upgrade (a machine roughly half the price I think) and it's night and day. I can use Docker now without Slack getting laggy.
I guess the new benchmark for development is can it run Slack? (While developing)
In my experience, yeah unfortunately. Slack goes to shit if the computer is under load, way before other software.
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#6[deleted]
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#7On one hand, these machines are clearly superior, and it's a no brainer for companies to purchase them for development. On the other, this is just another one in the long line of examples of bad software practices being overcome by throwing more money and hardware at the problem. Is there any reason for an iOS app build to take 8+ minutes to begin with? And does anyone realistically believe that once all developers have these shiny new computers build time won't creep up again till everyone starts demanding M2 and M3?
This problem extends to the consumer side as well. Developers use expensive MacBooks and fiber internet connections and the end user has a laggy experience running the hundreds of megabytes of JavaScript on an average site. The user has no choice but to upgrade their computer, and then companies see the new spare CPU cycles and fill them up as well. The end result is that while hardware keeps getting ridiculously faster and more efficient, user experience doesn't noticeably improve.
It is just Writh's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law) in action.
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#8"Based on rough usage patterns, we assumed an average iOS engineer does around five clean builds and 30 incremental builds each day..."
...wait, what? I know YMMW, but for me and most of my colleagues it's 1-2 clean build per day and 30 incremental... per hour, sometimes.
"...In parallel with our modularization effort, we’re also adopting new technologies like SwiftUI and Xcode Previews. These technologies allow us to almost entirely remove the tweak-compile-and-run loop when developing user interfaces."
This sounds more like SwiftUI ad/SEO blogpost than real developer's insights. SwiftUI Previews is notorious for crashing, timeouts and random errors. I have a lot of problems with these on small projects, not to mention bigger ones at work. It's also a nonsense to proclaim 'it remove tweak-and-compile' loop. Any change to model layer requires you to rebuild project, otherwise Previews will return old state. Not to mention that Xcode likes to rebuild project even for UI-only change.
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#9Essential for any development occurring on a Mac IMO. I upgraded from a fully specced out 16inch to a base model M1 with the 32GB upgrade (a machine roughly half the price I think) and it's night and day. I can use Docker now without Slack getting laggy.
I guess the new benchmark for development is can it run Slack? (While developing)
arguably slack having performance issues might increase most developers productivity
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#10On one hand, these machines are clearly superior, and it's a no brainer for companies to purchase them for development. On the other, this is just another one in the long line of examples of bad software practices being overcome by throwing more money and hardware at the problem. Is there any reason for an iOS app build to take 8+ minutes to begin with? And does anyone realistically believe that once all developers h…
The user does have a choice: do not use crappy slow services. For example I stopped using Instacart because there was a long lag each time I typed a single character is the search box. Amazon and Peapod did not have this problem.