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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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by ihateolives »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #73
asdff wrote: post #52

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. I…

Developer happiness. Same reason my company doesn't make me fly economy when I travel. A cheap laptop says "drone on, you drones." A nice laptop says "we want you to be happy here."

I'm with you on point about laptop, because laptop is something that I use every day, but not on air travel.

Air travel is such a colossal waste of environment and time so to top it off with additional cost to the company for "developer experience" is so unnecessary. If a company wants me, a developer, to fly in in business class I'd immediately think that they prefer to concentrate on showing off instead of concentrating on things that really matter. Unless it's a fucking Ryanair (don't know what's US equivalent of shitty el cheapo airline), I'd be fine flying in economy. I'd rather the company spend the money on my salary or work environment instead of one time showoff so that I could sip champagne and put my feet up while flying for 4 hours.

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

#123

Post by ihateolives »

tehjoker wrote: post #19

I 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.

I have been putting off upgrading my thinkpad for a while now because performance increase has always been incremental, 15% speedup does not really warrant a whole new laptop, but M1 has been first time I've actually been impressed with gains.

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

#124

Post by dTal »

TheNewAndy wrote: post #119
xenadu02 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simulator support for GPU rendering is far from trivial so it isn't about "bothering". Metal jobs are packaged up along with shaders and proxied out to the host macOS Metal framework. Textures are backed by IOSurfaces which do some fancy Mach memory mapping tricks to share memory between your app in a simulator, the macOS side of Metal, and sometimes GPU memory (on Intel Macs with discrete GPUs). For the most part th…

With the amount of cash apple has, it very much is about bothering. They have the resources to make their development tools not terrible, but instead they seem to be investing in... cash for a rainy day.

Maybe they plan to bring an M1 iPhone to market, so it's not worth the considerable engineering effort to fix a problem that will go away by itself in a while.

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

#125

Post by udbhavs »

azinman2 wrote: post #103
kitsunesoba wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t wait for the next macOS + iOS updates so I can use Universal Control to run Slack on my iPad and never have to open their bloated web/electron app ever again. I wish Slack would just let us run the iOS app on our macs with Catalyst, but they seem pretty bent on pushing desktop OS users to the web/electron version.

Is the iOS app not also web based?

For a short while when the M1 macs first released, people were successfully sideloading the iOS versions of Discord and Slack on them which were significantly lighter, but I think Apple has patched it now and it's not possible anymore

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

#127

Post by criddell »

ihateolives wrote: post #122
ARandomerDude wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developer happiness. Same reason my company doesn't make me fly economy when I travel. A cheap laptop says "drone on, you drones." A nice laptop says "we want you to be happy here."

I'm with you on point about laptop, because laptop is something that I use every day, but not on air travel. Air travel is such a colossal waste of environment and time so to top it off with additional cost to the company for "developer experience" is so unnecessary. If a company wants me, a developer, to fly in in business class I'd immediately think that they prefer to concentrate on showing off instead of concentr…

Champagne? Sounds like you are describing first class and I was thinking the person you replied to was talking about business class. Typically, that's a seat closer to the front of the plane with a tiny bit more space.

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

#128

Post by dbbk »

asdff wrote: post #52

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. I…

Even Apple is moving into this space with Xcode Cloud.

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

#129

Post by ARandomerDude »

ihateolives wrote: post #122
ARandomerDude wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developer happiness. Same reason my company doesn't make me fly economy when I travel. A cheap laptop says "drone on, you drones." A nice laptop says "we want you to be happy here."

I'm with you on point about laptop, because laptop is something that I use every day, but not on air travel. Air travel is such a colossal waste of environment and time so to top it off with additional cost to the company for "developer experience" is so unnecessary. If a company wants me, a developer, to fly in in business class I'd immediately think that they prefer to concentrate on showing off instead of concentr…

> Air travel is such a colossal waste of environment and time

You're sure? For everyone across all fields? The simple fact is in many professional contexts, air travel is mandatory (including for many developers). I fly several times a year for work because the nature of my development job demands it.

> I'd rather the company spend the money on my salary or work environment

This is the point I was making. Since I have to travel, a relatively cheap business class upgrade (not first class) is the company spending money on my work environment.

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

#130

Post by cudgy »

h0l0cube wrote: post #72
billforsternz wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you worked with SwiftUI or Jetpack Compose? The new tooling for mobile development requires basically building the app to simulate the layout engine. And when you're building interfaces, ideally you want < 1 second updates so you can tweak things that don't lend themselves perfectly to foresight and analytical thinking - you just need feedback. Jetpack Compose in particular is atrociously slow. When was taking 1…

The efficiency of these IDE’s (XCode and Android Studio) is absolutely terrible. My guess is once these wonderful M1 processors become more mainstream, the efficiency will become worse until the M1s seem slow. Hardware can never catch up to terrible software performance; software developers won’t allow it.
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