Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

incident.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 432 posts

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#151

Post by fsckboy »

wtetzner wrote: post #93
fsckboy wrote: post #89

I feel like there is a correlation between fast-twitch programming muscles and technical debt. Some coding styles that are rewarded by fast compile times can be more akin to "throw it at the wall, see if it sticks" style development. Have you ever been summoned to help a junior colleague who is having a problem, and you immediately see some grievous errors, errors that give you pause. You point the first couple out,…

There's a lot of value in a short iteration loop when debugging unexpected behavior. Often you end up needing to keep trying different variations until you understand what's going on.

thank you for quickly writing the fast twitch response! :)

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#152

Post by varispeed »

boringuser2 wrote: post #95

I get a bit of a toxic vibe from a couple comments in that article. Chiefly, I think the problem is that the CTO solved the wrong problem: the right problem to solve includes a combination of assessing why company public opinion is generating mass movements of people wanting a new MacBook literally every year, if this is even worth responding to at all (it isn't), and keeping employees happy. Most employees are reaso…

> Most employees are reasonsble enough to not be bothered if they don't get a new MacBook every year.

If you compare a jump between Intel and M1 and then numbers for newer generation I think they validate the desire to have a newer machine. It's not about having a new shiny object, but a tool that improves work. You only have one life and those seconds and minutes wasted on waiting on things add up. This is especially important for neurodivergent people, with conditions like ADD. Even waiting few seconds less for something to finish can have an impact - it may get the result just before one completely moved their train on thought on different tracks. I wouldn't like to work for an employer with such a patronising and nonchalant view of equipment. Your comment is actually toxic.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#153

Post by berkut »

It's interesting to me that being on A/C and Battery power showed a performance difference: when I benchmarked a M1 Pro MBPro against an Intel 2015 MBPro two years ago, I didn't notice any performance differences between being on battery or using mains power in either laptop, which surprised me at the time:

https://pixelesque.net/blog/2022/08/basic-apple-m1-pro-cpu-b...

I wonder what the difference is... Maybe my tests were too short to show the difference between mains and battery?

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#154

Post by FireBeyond »

vaxman wrote: post #84

1. If, and only if, you are doing ML or multimedia, get a 128GB system and because of the cost of that RAM, it would be foolish not to go M3 Max SoC (notwithstanding the 192GB M2 Ultra SoC). Full Stop. (Note: This is also a good option for people with more money than brains.) 2. If you are doing traditional heavyweight software development, or are concerned with perception in an interview, promotional context or just…

> You can even get by with the 8GB M1 MBA because the MacOS memory compressor is really good and the SSD is really fast.

I thought that general consensus was that 8GB Macs were hammering the life of the SSDs? Yeah, they're fast, but people were talking about dozens of GB a day of swapping happening. And these aren't enterprise class SSDs, despite what Apple charges for them.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#155

Post by dmos62 »

LASR wrote: post #90

Solid analysis. A word of warning from personal experience: I am part of a medium-sized software company (2k employees). A few years ago, we wanted to improve dev productivity. Instead of going with new laptops, we decided to explore offloading the dev stack over to AWS boxes. This turned out to be a multi-year project with a whole team of devs (~4) working on it full-time. In hindsight, the tradeoff wasn't worth it.…

My dev box died (that I used for remote work), and instead of buying something new immediately, I moved my setup to a Hetzner cloud vps. Took around 2 days. Stuff like setting up termux on my tablet and the cli environment on the vps was 90 percent of that. The plus side was that I then spent the remaining summer working outside in the terrace and in the park. Was awesome. I was able to do it because practically all of my tools are command line based (vim, etc).

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#156

Post by grecy »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #121
lawrjone wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using an Intel Mac at this point, you should 100% upgrade. The performance of the MX chips blows away the Intel chips and there's almost no friction with the arm architecture at this point. I don't use VSCode but most of my team do and I frequently pair with them. Never noticed it to be anything other than very snappy. They all have M1s or up (I am the author of this post, so the detail about their hardware…

There can be plenty of friction depending on your use case.

It would be very helpful if you told us the use cases that have friction so we know if they apply to our use cases

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#157

Post by hmottestad »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #121
lawrjone wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using an Intel Mac at this point, you should 100% upgrade. The performance of the MX chips blows away the Intel chips and there's almost no friction with the arm architecture at this point. I don't use VSCode but most of my team do and I frequently pair with them. Never noticed it to be anything other than very snappy. They all have M1s or up (I am the author of this post, so the detail about their hardware…

There can be plenty of friction depending on your use case.

What software are you worried about? Hackernews is a great place to share and hear if anyone has similar experiences or maybe managed to find a fix!

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#158

Post by uncanny »

I just upgraded to the top M3 Max CPU from the top M2 Max CPU.

I benchmarked several test suites to compare the machines. The test suites for two different Rails applications were around 10% faster on the M3 Max. A test suite for a Go web application that does significant integration testing in parallel (i.e. multiple complete stacks of database, application server, and browser) improved by around 20%. The extra P-cores help. Miscellaneous other tests and benchmarks were around 7-10% faster.

Didn't notice any difference in normal usage.

So not likely worth the upgrade unless your workload can really make use of the extra cores.

Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

#159

Post by hmottestad »

whalesalad wrote: post #42
ghaff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes you only use one laptop. I have a couple 2015 Macs that are very useful for browser tasks. They’re not paperweights and I use them daily.

I have a rack in my basement with a combined 96 cores and 192gb of ram (proxmox cluster), and a 13900k/64gb desktop workstation for most dev work. I usually will offload workloads to those before leveraging one of these old laptops that is usually dead battery. If I need something for "browser tasks" (I am interpreting this as cross-browser testing?) I have dedicated VMs for that. For just browsing the web, my M2 is…

I went the complete opposite of you. I enjoy being able run everything on my laptop, be it at home, at a cafe, at work or on the train. So I’ve maxed out a MacBook Pro instead. It doesn’t have 96 cores, but it’ll go head to head with your dev workstation and even let me play around with LLMs locally. Fans as usually silent, except when using the GPU for LLMs.

One thing that I could do with your rig though would be to start benchmarks to check for performance regressions, and then just put my laptop in my backpack.

Post reply on HN