Early reviews said that even the base 8GB RAM models were snappy, despite the small amount of RAM. I went in believing that, but turns out it was anything but. Maybe it was my specific usage (Firefox with tons of tabs, Electron apps open all the time) but it feels much more sluggish than my previous 2013 iMac. Next one I get is definitely going to have 16GB minimum, maybe 24GB.
Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
161–170 of 284 posts
Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
#162We had already eliminated Docker from our CI/CD and live deployments (using Kaniko for CI/CD and containerd for live), so we just modified our container build pipeline to run Kaniko twice (once for x86_64 and once for arm64) and then use manifest-tool to build and upload the multi-arch container manifest. I think we had it working within a day, and then it took a week or so to test and validate all our images, and one or two needed some attention due to having dependencies that weren't already multi-arch. Overall it was really painless.
For testing container builds on developer machines most people are either using Docker on macOS which already handles multi-arch cleanly, or using buildah on Linux which also handles multi-arch automatically if you set up qemu binfmt support. So that has been pretty painless too.
I would say if you are doing a lot of horrible workarounds, it's probably time to step back and look at improving the processes (like your pipelines).
Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
#163Early reviews said that even the base 8GB RAM models were snappy, despite the small amount of RAM. I went in believing that, but turns out it was anything but. Maybe it was my specific usage (Firefox with tons of tabs, Electron apps open all the time) but it feels much more sluggish than my previous 2013 iMac. Next one I get is definitely going to have 16GB minimum, maybe 24GB.
I'm using a base-spec M1 MacBook Air since a year or so now. I have a 4K external monitor attached most of the time, usually four windows in Safari with perhaps 100 tabs in total, Mail, a bunch of terminals, Slack, Signal and Telegram open. It's snappy all the time, and consistently feels much much faster than my previous laptop which was a maxed-out Intel 13" MacBook Pro.
The only thing that ever makes it sluggish is if I open VSCode with a large workspace. Even with all plugins disabled. No idea why. I just stopped using VSCode.
Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
#164I just had a leap of faith and god an M1 MBA with 8GB of RAM in January 1st around 1 month after its release
And I never had any problems with it up until now. I use Chrome (Vivaldi) with tons of tabs and VS code with NodeJs and Java development and it was all snappy all the way
The main problem I had was at that time whether there will be application support for ARM and almost all the apps I use started supporting ARM as soon as the M1 came out
I only had to use Rosetta few times and NodeJS also started supporting ARM architecture as well
But next time I’ll be going for a higher RAM than 8gb for longevity
But I think I’ll be using this for couple more years and I think I’ll be skipping M2 since my M1 is good for now
Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
#165Early reviews said that even the base 8GB RAM models were snappy, despite the small amount of RAM. I went in believing that, but turns out it was anything but. Maybe it was my specific usage (Firefox with tons of tabs, Electron apps open all the time) but it feels much more sluggish than my previous 2013 iMac. Next one I get is definitely going to have 16GB minimum, maybe 24GB.
I'm using a base-spec M1 MacBook Air since a year or so now. I have a 4K external monitor attached most of the time, usually four windows in Safari with perhaps 100 tabs in total, Mail, a bunch of terminals, Slack, Signal and Telegram open. It's snappy all the time, and consistently feels much much faster than my previous laptop which was a maxed-out Intel 13" MacBook Pro. The only thing that ever makes it sluggish i…
Safari might be the big difference here, and you only really have one Electron/Chromium app, Slack, and it's generally better than others about managing its resource usage.
Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm using a base-spec M1 MacBook Air since a year or so now. I have a 4K external monitor attached most of the time, usually four windows in Safari with perhaps 100 tabs in total, Mail, a bunch of terminals, Slack, Signal and Telegram open. It's snappy all the time, and consistently feels much much faster than my previous laptop which was a maxed-out Intel 13" MacBook Pro. The only thing that ever makes it sluggish i…
Safari might be the big difference here, and you only really have one Electron/Chromium app, Slack, and it's generally better than others about managing its resource usage.
Yup, I switched back to Safari because I noticed Firefox uses significantly more energy (battery lasts a few hours less when I'm out). So it's likely that it has an impact on responsiveness too.
Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mac-using devs are mostly Linux-using devs who prefer a non-free distro ;)
Mac-using devs will file tickets that CI/CD is not working, and don't know how to configure their system to use GNU coreutils. They all just use VS Code or Jetbrains and that's about it, so hell if I know why they need a $3000 machine to run shell commands they don't understand on. I desperately wish one of the big boys would push enterprise Linux dev machines hard.
Seems to be moving slowly but Lenovo, Dell and HP are all offering Linux as options - which is something I never would have bet on ten years ago.
Not quite _pushing hard_ though.
Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
#1681. Run arm-based debian using Parallels, headless using `prlctl`. SSH in and use tmux. 2. Everything you install will be arm based. Docker will pull arm-based images locally. Most every project (that we use) now has arm support via docker manifests. 3. Use binfmt to cross-compile x86 images within prlctl, or have CI auto-build images on x86 machines. That pretty much does it.
A couple more votes for this over the past year, using NixOS:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31094361&p=2#31101729
Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
#169There are many comments here that goes: "we had to do all sorts of configuration for this to work, but it's been great and we like it". As a primarily Linux user these feel like very familiar stories. It's kinda refreshing to hear those stories from mac users. Maybe we are not so different after all.
Mac-using devs are mostly Linux-using devs who prefer a non-free distro ;)
Some of us cut our teeth on BSD even before linux and Darwin is like a familiar friend’s cousin from across town.
Re: Ask HN: How are you dealing with the M1/ARM migration?
#170Early reviews said that even the base 8GB RAM models were snappy, despite the small amount of RAM. I went in believing that, but turns out it was anything but. Maybe it was my specific usage (Firefox with tons of tabs, Electron apps open all the time) but it feels much more sluggish than my previous 2013 iMac. Next one I get is definitely going to have 16GB minimum, maybe 24GB.
If you don't have enough ram no processor can save you. And if you aren't running out of ram adding more won't help. The m1 isn't magic and I'm sure it does some things slower than Intel and some things faster. Maybe for your workload or is slower. For the workloads I run (rails apps, postgres) the m1 has almost identical performance to the Intel i9, but is more efficient in terms of battery life.