Considering that there is nothing better out there I would definitely say yes. The M2 is incredibly thermally constrained so I wouldn't advice it for developers.
Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
21–30 of 37 posts
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#22No. Get a Dell Latitude 5480.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#23Go 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.
It's lighter and easier to travel with. The 16" doesn't really fit on an airplane food tray, for example, and I don't think it fits in my messenger bag either.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#24Go for the 16"; the extra size gets you better cooling, screen real estate and battery life for roughly another $250 or less.
Are there any numbers on the difference in cooling? Is it significant? I don't generally want a laptop that large, but I have also had many laptops that run too hot in the past.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#25Go for the 16"; the extra size gets you better cooling, screen real estate and battery life for roughly another $250 or less.
Are there any numbers on the difference in cooling? Is it significant? I don't generally want a laptop that large, but I have also had many laptops that run too hot in the past.
Yeah, the difference is 10-13 F. IMO it's on the edge of being uncomfortable, and it's not super easy to do (like, how often do you run Cinebench with the computer on your lap), but if it's a concern then yeah, there's a significant difference.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-14-2021-Lapt...
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-16-2021-M1-M...
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#26I use a M1 pro 13" ans it’s more than good enough. Some coworkers have the 14" but it’s a lot more chubby and I’m not sure the performance gain is worth the size increase unless you do more GPU work (but you would want a better GPU anyway).
I’m not using flutter but react development is very smooth on the M1, especially when you use vite.
But you absolutely need at least 16GB of ram is you use a VM or two.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#27I recently got a MacBook Pro with an M1 Max. So a little bit more powerful than what you're looking at. Overall I'm pretty happy with it. I know a souped-up M2 (Likely a "M2 Max") is likely this year, but the difference between The original M1 and the M2 is so marginal that I doubt it's worth the wait for a hypothetical "M2 Max".
Isn't the m2 twice as slow as the m1?
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#28I recently got a MacBook Pro with an M1 Max. So a little bit more powerful than what you're looking at. Overall I'm pretty happy with it. I know a souped-up M2 (Likely a "M2 Max") is likely this year, but the difference between The original M1 and the M2 is so marginal that I doubt it's worth the wait for a hypothetical "M2 Max".
Isn't the m2 twice as slow as the m1?
The smallest SSD on the M2 MacBook is twice as slow as the smallest SSD of the equivalent old M1 yes.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#29React is not that demanding in terms of computer performance, especially if you switched to esbuild.
Re: Ask HN: M1 Pro 14' still worth it for development?
#30It'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, bei…
You don't install npm packages (or any language development packages) with brew. You install nvm with brew and go forward with it.