[flagged]
I work on the road a lot. In many cases I’m compiling code in transit to and at test sites, so laptop is a must-have.
Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
41–50 of 432 posts
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 still king as it has zero fan, makes no noise, and will last for days without charging if you are just browsing the web or writing documentation.
I would rather have a ton of beefy compute that is remotely accessible and one single lightweight super portable laptop, personally.
I should probably donate these mac laptops to someone who is less fortunate. I would love to do that, actually.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]
> That is simply impossible. You cannot fit multiple 16x PCI-Express cards in a laptop chassis
What does this have to do with compiling code?
Obviously, if someone needs x16 PCIe cards they aren’t in the market for a laptop anyway.
The only people comparing laptop versus desktop are those for whom both platforms can actually do what they need.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]
Perhaps many people building code do not need multiple 16x PCI-Express cards in their day to day workflow, but like being able to move around with their laptop?
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#45Does 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.
The 2018 macbook pros weren't even using the best silicon of the time - they were in the middle of Intel's "14nm skylake again" period, and an AMD GPU from 2016.
I suspect one of the reasons why Apple silicon looks so good is the previous generations were at a dip of performance. Maybe they took the foot off the gas WRT updates as they knew the M series of chips was coming soon?
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#46This 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.
Yeah, I thought it was really cool! (am author)
It's pretty cool how it works, too: the OpenAI Assistant uses the LLM to take your human instructions like "how many builds is in the dataset?" and translate that into Python code which is run in a sandbox on OpenAI compute with access to the dataset you've uploaded.
Under the hood everything is just numpy, pandas and gnuplot, you're just using a human interface to a Python interpreter.
We've been building an AI feature into our product recently that behaves like this and it's crazy how good it can get. I've done a lot of data analysis in my past and using these tools blew me away, it's so much easier to jump into complex analysis without tedious setup.
And a tip I figured out halfway through: if you want to, you can ask the chat for an iPython notebook of it's calculations. So you can 'disable autopilot' and jump into manual if you ever want finer control over the analysis it runs. Pretty wild.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#47My personal research for iOS development, taking the cost into consideration, concluded:
- M2 Pro is nice, but the improvement over 10 core (8 perf cores) M1 Pro is not that large (136 vs 120 s in Xcode benchmark: https://github.com/devMEremenko/XcodeBenchmark)
- M3 Pro is nerfed (only 6 perf cores) to better distinguish and sell M3 Max, basically on par with M2 Pro
So, in the end, I got a slightly used 10 core M1 Pro and am very happy, having spent less than half of what the base M3 Pro would cost, and got 85% of its power (and also, considering that you generally need to have at least 33 to 50 % faster CPU to even notice the difference :)).
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#48[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.
You're slightly wrong.
The performance is better than all but the super expensive performance halo parts... sometimes. Sometimes it's just better full stop.
As someone who despises macOS: get the mac.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#49[flagged]
WFH is effectively work from anywhere. I can take a month long working vacation and save a vacation day by working on the airplane.
I'd be very annoyed if my work chained me to my home desk.
Re: Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t use a desktop on a ferry or plane or at my Aunt’s over Thanksgiving
Your working equipment shouldn't be optimized around the possibility of you logging in for five minutes while on holiday.
When you travel a fair bit for work or support WFH environments, I think it should cater for that, right?