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Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

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Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#31

Honestly, I'm starting to understand Louis Rossman's indifference towards these computers. In one of his most recent streams, someone asked him what he thought about the M1 Macs, and he simply responded "it's faster than the last computer Apple made", which summed up a lot of how I feel about it too. I'm saying this as my M1 Macbook Air sits on a shelf collecting dust a few feet away from me, which is definitely not…

Sound like a Desktop Linux experience. I know, very controversial to say it here but if you think about it, through the years using desktop Linux meant that you will have a lot of cool stuff alongside with a dealbreaker like a monitor not working properly or a flashdrive causing kernel error.

How long it has been since M1 introduction? 4 months?

I recall the story about Microsoft buying all the available software out there and testing it one by one on the new version of windows and creating workarounds for specific versions of specific software. On the linux side of the things this never happened.

I doubt that Apple is doing it too but it looks like the developers are doing it instead. Probably most of the stuff will iron out within the "2 years of transition period" which we are at about %15.

The stuff that doesn't iron out will simply get obsolete and replaced. Why? Because Apple means "I have better things to do than dealing with this gadget and I am prepared to pay for if you can help me not deal with it".

Whatever software or hardware is broken is some competitors opportunity. Oh, and Rossman has his own agenda. That's why he doesn't care, he will care if there's a scandal or something.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#32
Same here, i'm loving my M1

To the detractors, you better ask your favorite laptop company to step up their game instead of being jealous at apple and M1 in particular

PS: i'm not talking about microsoft people, or maybe i am :D

Bonus: https://twitter.com/NovallSwift/status/1356111709602160640

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what made you think that a macbook air would replace a desktop computer?

A decently fast laptop can definitely replace an older desktop computer without issue. When my old gaming rig died in 2017, I bought a laptop for work and plugged it in my monitors. Apart from graphics, the laptop was measurably faster on all accounts.

Fair enough but theres also a 3 year gap on those machines you are comparing.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#34
I'm a kernel engineer, focusing on performance. My intel MBP died and i replaced it with an M1 about 6 weeks ago. The M1 has been very handy, since it gave me (via a Qemu VM) a local FreeBSD/arm64 native build environment just when I started looking at FreeBSD/arm64 performance.

The one issue that I have is that Intel Vtune crashes when displaying data collected on our servers.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#35
post #24

Honestly, I'm starting to understand Louis Rossman's indifference towards these computers. In one of his most recent streams, someone asked him what he thought about the M1 Macs, and he simply responded "it's faster than the last computer Apple made", which summed up a lot of how I feel about it too. I'm saying this as my M1 Macbook Air sits on a shelf collecting dust a few feet away from me, which is definitely not…

> I bought the Macbook Air with the intention of using it to replace my aging desktop rig, but was pretty surprised to find that it couldn't drive both of my monitors. > I can't use my OS of choice on it, I can't use my software of choice on it, I can't upgrade or fix anything on it, and I can't trust the swap to not shred the SSD. Minimal due diligence would probably have helped you not waste 1000+ dollars on a lapt…

Speaking as another sad owner of a Macbook Air (pre-M1), I do wish Apple made it more clear that they can't drive monitors well, but I agree with your overall sentiment – OP probably would have been much, much happier with a higher-spec'd M1 MBP (though given the price and their OS preference, maybe still not happy enough).

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#36
post #13

As an outsider looking in, it's hard to take this post seriously. There are biases evident, the most glaring of which is the proclamation that "all of my software 'just works'" followed by a laundry list of software for which beta versions had to be installed in order to be functional at all (including Docker). It's frankly surprising to me how many hoops people are willing to jump through to use an Apple machine whe…

I own a M1 Mini, I do no development on PC or Mac. I use tools like editors and such but the work is all done on other boxes. So for me it is a matter of which type of machine covers the bulk of my needs.

When it comes to Apple it always has been an issue if you wanted to play games. On intel macs you could VM or Bootcamp to windows. That isn't an option on a M1 mac. Worse, while some iOS games are coming to M series systems some current developers of games that work on both PC and Mac are not creating Mac versions; the most notable is Blizzard who brought World of Warcraft to Mac but has stated the new Diablo 2 Resurrected, Diablo 4, and other titles, are not planned. Only one company has stated any intention going forward that has a large catalog and that was Feral.

All this means for those of us who like some recreation with our work and every day computer use (email/net/etc) Apple has their work cut out from them even more because now options are more limited.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#37

Git going missing is likely to do with macOS updates. Since Apple moved to sealed system partition and "non-diff" os updates, each OS update comes as a unified whole package (often sized in the multiple gigs of data) This wipes out the xcode-select installed git (because instead of "patching" the existing system, it just replaces the whole lot of it with whatever is in the archive). It leaves xcode alone (since that'…

I just got a M1 macbook yesterday and this annoyed me. I installed git via xcode-select, then macOS prompted me to do a OS update, which I did, and then found out that git is gone. Definitely not the most pleasant experience. Especially that after the update macOS didn't prompt me to install the commandline tools like it did the first tie I ran 'git' in the terminal. I had to find out via some googling what happened and how to fix it.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#38
> An issue I ran into with the amd64 version was that I did not realize that the terminal was also an amd64 process...

Wow! That’s a huge gotcha that for some reason I didn’t even consider when I was having package issues with numpy among others.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#39

Honestly, I'm starting to understand Louis Rossman's indifference towards these computers. In one of his most recent streams, someone asked him what he thought about the M1 Macs, and he simply responded "it's faster than the last computer Apple made", which summed up a lot of how I feel about it too. I'm saying this as my M1 Macbook Air sits on a shelf collecting dust a few feet away from me, which is definitely not…

> I can't use my OS of choice on it, I can't use my software of choice on it, I can't upgrade or fix anything on it, and I can't trust the swap to not shred the SSD.

It is just as locked in like an iPhone.

When at least one component of that computer is ruined, as you said it can't be simply swapped out and it time for a trip to the Apple Store if you're using it for the long term. If the SSD in the M1 is dead for some reason, you might as well buy the same model again but with your data lost.

> Am I missing something here? Time and time again I hear people say "you're not the target audience", and I'm getting the impression they're right.

It's true. It's for those who really love the Apple ecosystem and don't care about computers or opening them up. Right now the early adopters are realising the limits of the first generation M1 Macs.

Are they show-stoppers? Not for some of the casual users using Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, Word, Chrome and their favourite email client and users that aren't developers or professional creators but for those working in those fields will probably run into more 'incompatible software' complaints and using unstable workarounds.

Re: Using Apple Silicon (M1) as a cloud engineer, two months in

#40
post #6

Love my M1, but a heads up – if you're dependent on Postgres-based tests running inside of Docker (quite a common usecase!) the performance is completely unusable still: https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/5236 We're talking a suite that normally takes 30 seconds taking 10+ minutes.

My solution for such is parallels beta (m1 supported), and arm Debian Linux.

So you primarily use a virtualized Linux install on your M1 machine for dev work? That seems really cumbersome... at that point I’d just point to a headless Linux server
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