This machine is only six months old, and with the rise of Apple Silicon the tooling and backwards compatibility is only going to get better.
Also, Flutter and react are not exactly the most demanding development frameworks.
Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
11–20 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#12Go for the 16"; the extra size gets you better cooling, screen real estate and battery life for roughly another $250 or less.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#13I love mine. It’s actually not that much bigger than the new M2 Air and weight is negligible for me (although difference is there). It’s the perfect form factor for the times you want to code away from your desk.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#14In terms of cpu it’d still be gross overkill for the application.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#15Im using it since it came out (16 GB ram, M1 Pro 10 core CPU - meaning: the middle one.), including React development - it is more than enough and a pleasure to work with. Docker is also much faster than on Intel based MBP 2015 15".
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#16Of course. The M1 is already lightyears ahead of any kind of other past Macbook model. I have the Air M1 (that doesnt even have active cooling) and it's blazingly fast in anything I throw at it.
Granted, maybe it's a valid consideration for video editors and the like, but you won't notice significant differences in our line of work.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#17It's not a good question tbh ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html ) If your question is about whether to wait for the next iteration see: https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#mac As a general purpose machine for development / web dev, then the answer is yes, it's still worth using because it was worth using when it first launched and that didn't change. Many guides come with instructions specifically fo…
> It's not a good question tbh
ESR is mostly wrong about this. He assumes that the person asking the question is not writing in good faith or that they have not considered and dismissed alternatives, without evidence. It's almost always appropriate to assume the person asked what they asked for a good reason ignore the question if you don't know the answer.
SO is plagued with this nonsense, where people answer the question they wish was posted (because it's all they know?) instead of just moving on.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#18Go for the 16"; the extra size gets you better cooling, screen real estate and battery life for roughly another $250 or less.
Is there ever a reason to go for the smaller factor? At work, we got 13" macbooks, and I wish we'd gotten the one-size-up ones. I'm a reasonably healthy human being, and can easily carry the slightly larger version - not that I do, because 99% of the time it's sitting on my desk, anyway. When I'm away from my large monitor, it irks me that I don't have more screen real-estate.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#19It's not a good question tbh ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html ) If your question is about whether to wait for the next iteration see: https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#mac As a general purpose machine for development / web dev, then the answer is yes, it's still worth using because it was worth using when it first launched and that didn't change. Many guides come with instructions specifically fo…
I cannot recommend brew for react development (NPM). Installing NPM packages through brew is not supported by projects that require global packages. NPM installed through brew frequently runs into issues by projects that expect packages via NPM to be in /usr/local but are not symlinked. This is not even mentioning all other flaws of brew, such as owning /opt or /usr/local to your user breaking multi user support, being based on git and subsequently very slow, brew breaking on even point releases of macOS.
I recently started a job that requires react and docker so here's what works for me. Install node.js from their website, use npm to install typescript language server globally, docker binaries like Minikube suggest using `sudo install minikube`, reading the manual for `install` says it simply copies the binary over to /usr/local/bin (already in path! security issue for brew owning this to your user??). You can then use `install` for any CLI tools you need (jq!).
macOS was never designed for package managers, brew does an exceptionally poor job at being a package manager while also fighting against macOS to stay functioning. I highly recommend avoiding brew, it is certainly not a necessity nor supported by packages it hosts.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#20I will argue that M1 Pro 14 is not necessary for development. M2 MacBook Air is enough though if you're using docker I recommend upgrading ram to at least 16gb for the qemu VM alone.