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Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

doordash.engineering

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Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#51

Post by spiderice »

flax wrote: post #47
ctdonath wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a computer to compile at all. If you’re doing iOS you probably already have an iPhone. Old physical phones (cheap) are fine for dev, can simulate latest. $100/yr only needed if you’re actually charging for the app - which should earn you those costs pretty soon. Yes, $1000 baseline for what you likely already have most of. The “largely free” is in contrast with platforms having >$25,000/yr entry costs just f…

Except that it's actually in direct contrast with Android development, where the tools are available, for actually free, for Windows, Linux, and Mac. And the developer account is a one time $25. My personal situation: I wanted to add an iOS client for the game I've been developing in Flutter. I did not have a mac or an iphone already. Fortunately, I've been able to borrow them for builds and occasional testing. But,…

> and there's zero good reason that Apple couldn't provide their build tools for other platforms

How do you figure? Then Apple would have to maintain their build tools for other platforms. Waste of resources for something that ultimately isn't going to make Apple money. It's no different than Microsoft intentionally gimping Excel on Mac.

I've never seen anyone complain that they have to own a Windows computer to develop Windows apps. Or a Playstation to develop Playstation games. I'm not sure why Apple is such an exception in your eyes.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#52

Post by asdff »

Why do companies even build locally anymore? It's never been cheaper to spin up your own cluster that's going to be more than enough horsepower. If you give your devs the $899 air instead of the $2300 16", I feel like that $1400 surplus per dev would go a long way in buying some nodes that are going to still be some muscle 5 years from now. You could buy two mac minis per dev and set up an m1 cluster if you wanted. If you didn't want that overhead, plenty of companies sell compute by the second now these days too.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#53

Post by wmf »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #36
flax wrote: post #17

I 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 $…

> $1000 is not "largely free". It is absolutely insignificant compared to the cost of developing software. It’s a tool needed to do a job. Go talk to a carpenter, a builder or a mechanic and ask them how much they spent on tools. Then compare their hourly rates to that of a software engineer.

In the developed world I presume.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#54

Post by wmf »

GeekyBear wrote: post #42
flax wrote: post #17

I 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 $…

How quickly we forget what development costs looked like in the recent past >PlayStation developers need to cough up £ 12,000 for the full system (which Sony is adamant it doesn’t make money on), although all subsequent software tools and hardware upgrades are free. https://www.retroreversing.com/official-playStation-devkit Not to mention other obscene costs that were common, like charging developers to issue a patch…

I don't know if that's a great comparison since only 7,918 PlayStation games were ever released while computers and phones have literally millions.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#56

Post by nyanpasu64 »

spiderice wrote: post #51
flax wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it's actually in direct contrast with Android development, where the tools are available, for actually free, for Windows, Linux, and Mac. And the developer account is a one time $25. My personal situation: I wanted to add an iOS client for the game I've been developing in Flutter. I did not have a mac or an iphone already. Fortunately, I've been able to borrow them for builds and occasional testing. But,…

> and there's zero good reason that Apple couldn't provide their build tools for other platforms How do you figure? Then Apple would have to maintain their build tools for other platforms. Waste of resources for something that ultimately isn't going to make Apple money. It's no different than Microsoft intentionally gimping Excel on Mac. I've never seen anyone complain that they have to own a Windows computer to deve…

> Then Apple would have to maintain their build tools for other platforms. Waste of resources for something that ultimately isn't going to make Apple money.

It makes sense on Apple's part, but I still dislike it.

> I've never seen anyone complain that they have to own a Windows computer to develop Windows apps.

Windows can be installed on any computer, whereas macOS requires purchasing Mac hardware. Additionally you can cross-compile Windows apps on Linux (and possibly Mac) using MinGW toolchains (or with great difficulty, MSVC on Wine).

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#57

Post by billforsternz »

luigi23 wrote: post #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 t…

30 incremental builds an hour doesn't sound like a good process to me. Personally I find if I am building too often I'm not thinking about what I am doing enough and I'm just throwing things at a wall hoping they'll stick/work. A good software process involves a lot of thinking, a medium amount of typing, a small amount of compiling. I understand that sometimes the ideal and the reality are different of course.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#58

Post by FridgeSeal »

hughrr wrote: post #24
paxys wrote: post #7

On 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…

Yeah that's about it. What I find really offensive, which my Mac likes to remind me of regularly on the energy usage side of things, is the siloed vats of excrement that JavaScript, Browsers and Electron have enabled. These are absolutely horrible to use compared to native applications and each one has its own ozone hole above it. If I don't open a browser or Electron app my battery lasts 2x as long. I do the occasio…

Teams is the worst offender: it will single-handedly cycle my battery on a medium-long video call.

That’s just battery usage, not even touching on general performance, how buggy the app is in general.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#59

Post by stefan_ »

GeekyBear wrote: post #39
paxys wrote: post #7

On 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…

> Is there any reason for an iOS app build to take 8+ minutes to begin with? The speedup isn't limited to iOS app builds. For instance, at Reddit: >We recently found that the new 2021 M1 MacBooks cut our Android build times in half. https://twitter.com/softwarejameson/status/14559711620606976...

I guess Wirth was still not cynical enough because even he couldn't foresee that developers would deliberately break and degrade a working, fast application (namely, the website experience) just so they can go and write two separate, bloated applications that do somewhat the same but not really. Only to then complain about build times of applications that didn't need to exist in the first place.

Re: Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

#60

Post by hughrr »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #58
hughrr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's about it. What I find really offensive, which my Mac likes to remind me of regularly on the energy usage side of things, is the siloed vats of excrement that JavaScript, Browsers and Electron have enabled. These are absolutely horrible to use compared to native applications and each one has its own ozone hole above it. If I don't open a browser or Electron app my battery lasts 2x as long. I do the occasio…

Teams is the worst offender: it will single-handedly cycle my battery on a medium-long video call. That’s just battery usage, not even touching on general performance, how buggy the app is in general.

It's not that bad on my M1 MacBook Air to be fair. I had to do a training session which was 3h long on Teams and it ate 20% of the MBA's battery.

It was horrible on the previous Intel i5 MBP though.

I refused to install it on my M1Pro MBP!

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