This is pretty cool, also I love how you can use AI to read the data. Would take minutes if not hours to do it even just a year ago.
Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
31–40 of 432 posts
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#32Does anyone have any anecdoctal evidence around the snappiness of VsCode with Apple Silicon? I very begrudgingly switched over from SublimeText this year (after using it as my daily driver for ~10yrs). I have a beefy 2018 MBP but VScode just drags. This is the only thing pushing me to upgrade my machine right now but I'd be bummed if there's still not a significant improvement with an m3 pro.
VSCode works perfectly.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#33Does anyone have any anecdoctal evidence around the snappiness of VsCode with Apple Silicon? I very begrudgingly switched over from SublimeText this year (after using it as my daily driver for ~10yrs). I have a beefy 2018 MBP but VScode just drags. This is the only thing pushing me to upgrade my machine right now but I'd be bummed if there's still not a significant improvement with an m3 pro.
I have 2x intel macbook pro's that are honestly paperweights. Apple Silicon is infinitely faster. It's a bummer because one of them is also a 2018 fully loaded and I would have a hard time even selling it to someone because of how much better the M2/M3 is. It's wild when I see people building hackintoshes on like a Thinkpad T480 ... its like riding a pennyfarthing bicycle versus a ducati. My M2 Air is my favorite lap…
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.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#34[flagged]
Apple Silicon devices can get the same performance as a desktop in a laptop size. The only reason to get a desktop is if you need the Ultra chip.
And, the laptop gives you extra freedom for very, very little sacrifice (at least for Apple Silicon devices). I don't see any way you can argue for a desktop.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#35Does anyone have any anecdoctal evidence around the snappiness of VsCode with Apple Silicon? I very begrudgingly switched over from SublimeText this year (after using it as my daily driver for ~10yrs). I have a beefy 2018 MBP but VScode just drags. This is the only thing pushing me to upgrade my machine right now but I'd be bummed if there's still not a significant improvement with an m3 pro.
I've got a 12700k desktop with windows and an M1 macbook (not pro!) and my pandas notebooks run noticeably faster on the mac unless I'm able to max out all cores on the Intel chip (this is after, ahem, fixing the idiotic scheduler which would put the background python on E-cores.)
I couldn't believe it.
Absolutely get an apple silicon machine, no contest the best hardware on the market right now.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes I actually did the maths on this. If you want a GCP instance that is comparable to an M3 Pro 36GB, you're looking at an n2-standard-8 with a 1TB SSD, which comes out at $400/month. Assuming you have it running just 8 hours a day (if your developers clock in at exact times) and you can 1/3 that to make it $133/month, or $1600/year. We expect these MacBooks to have at least a 2 year life, which means you're compari…
1. With a savings plan or on-demand? 2. Keeping one instance on per developer indefinitely, or only when needed? 3. Shared nodes? Node pools? 4. Compared to what other instance types/sizes? 5. Spot pricing? Shared nodes brought up on-demand with a savings plan and spot pricing is the same cost if not cheaper than dedicated high-end laptops. And on top of that, they can actually scale their resources much higher than…
1. That was assuming 8 hours of regular usage a day that has GCP's sustained use discounts applied, though not the committed usage discounts you can negotiate (but this is hard if you don't want 24/7 usage).
2. The issue with only-when-needed is the cold-start time starts hurting you in ways we're trying to pay to avoid (we want 3. Shared as in cloud multi-tenant? Sure, we wouldn't be buying the exclusive rack for this.
4. n2-standard-8 felt comparable.
5. Not considered.
If it's interesting, we run a build machine for when developers push their code into a PR and we build a binary/container as a deployable artifact. We have one machine running a c3-highcpu-22 which is 22 CPUs and 44GB memory.
Even at the lower frequency of pushes to master the build latency spikes a lot on this machine when developers push separate builds simultaneously, so I'd expect we'd need a fair bit more capacity in a distributed build system to make the local builds (probably 5-10x as frequent) behave nicely.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#37[flagged]
Apple Silicon devices can get the same performance as a desktop in a laptop size. The only reason to get a desktop is if you need the Ultra chip. And, the laptop gives you extra freedom for very, very little sacrifice (at least for Apple Silicon devices). I don't see any way you can argue for a desktop.
[flagged]
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#38Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#39Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#40Importing a couple thousand RAW pictures into a Capture One library would take 2 h on my 2017 iMac. 5 min on my m3 mbp pro. Geekbench score differences were quite remarkable. I am still wondering if I should return it, though
Go on, I’ll bite: why?
2,356 € is way over my budget. The machine is amazing but the specs are stingy. Returning it and getting a cheaper one would give me a lot of disposable money to spend in restaurants