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Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
11–20 of 135 posts
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#12On 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…
This reminds me of the same phenomenon that occurs in traffic planning[0]
[0]: https://www.vtpi.org/tdm/tdm64.htm
Briefly, as impediments to congestion are introduced (bike lanes, tolls), individual cars either join or leave the traffic system until the delay for cars reaches a rough equilibrium based on what people will tolerate.
Seems the same is true for computing capacity.
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#13"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 t…
My biggest issue with SwiftUI previews is tweaks to a single UI file rebuilding random dependencies. Like, I just changed a color why is it rebuilding the graphing library AGAIN?
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#14"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 t…
My biggest issue with SwiftUI previews is tweaks to a single UI file rebuilding random dependencies. Like, I just changed a color why is it rebuilding the graphing library AGAIN?
I'm not an expert on Swift, but I can only guess that code injection mechanism that's been used for Previews resolves changes incorrectly.
Or the state got out of sync, so it's safer to rebuild the project rather than crash/timeout. Which unfortunately happens quite often, even after rebuild.
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#15One 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…
Sounds like it went through the software rendering path...
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#16Essential 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 thought the base model M1 maxed out at 16GB? Must be a M1 pro or max.
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#17I had to laugh at the opening: "The tools are largely free", except the bare minimum to develop for ios is a mac and the apple developer account (if you ever expect to publish your app). And a significant subset of functionality only works on physical devices and not emulators.
If you don't already have the mac and iphone, you're looking at $600 for a used macbook air, ~$300 for a used 2 generations old iphone, and $100 for the dev account.
$1000 is not "largely free".
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess the new benchmark for development is can it run Slack? (While developing)
arguably slack having performance issues might increase most developers productivity
I realise your post is in jest, but I've found that responsive slack (due to a similar machine upgrade) has actually had a noticeably positive effect on my productivity. Checking a slack notification is now a ~2-5 second task, quick enough that I can switch back to my task with losing context. It used to be more like 10-20 seconds if my machine was under load which was highly disruptive.
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#19I believe it. I did benchmarking on my algorithms and it wasn't uncommon to see speedups in that range just executing on newer hardware from an old laptop.
However, it's kind of amusing to think how shocked we are by this development when such things were taken for granted in the 90s.
Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development
#20I had to laugh at the opening: "The tools are largely free", except the bare minimum to develop for ios is a mac and the apple developer account (if you ever expect to publish your app). And a significant subset of functionality only works on physical devices and not emulators. If you don't already have the mac and iphone, you're looking at $600 for a used macbook air, ~$300 for a used 2 generations old iphone, and $…
came to post this, what a joke. are they steeped in privilege or what?!
maybe simply unaware of the alternative ecosystem costs