Experience with Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pro as a Software Developer

https://subedi.co/blog/2021/03/12/experience-with-apple-silicon-m1-macbook-as-a-software-developer

by ksubedi • 5 years ago

46 86 5 years ago

snissn2• 5 years ago

i went from the most expensive 2016 (?) macbook pro 15" with touchbar to the least expensive macbook air M1 and it feels like an absolutely amaaazing upgrade

larrik• 5 years ago

I'm glad to hear this. My desktop I use for both gaming and work is over 5 years old, and I worry about having my job tied to such an old machine. Since I couldn't source the components I wanted (Ryzen 5800 basically, which did become more available recently), I held off and then got convinced to try an Air M1. So my new laptop is arriving next week.

I've never seriously used OS X outside of struggling through it to develop apps, so I'm a bit nervous. I'm making the switch ironically so I can use MS Office (work is heavy on sharepoint), and for the portability.

snissn2• 5 years ago

it's so nice, i charge it so rarely i have trouble finding the charger :) super fast too!

fsociety• 5 years ago

Me too! It’s been awesome, it is very snappy and the battery life is 10/10. If I need anything more beefy or better software support I’m just an ssh away.

redisman• 5 years ago

The big difference is when you get the ARM binaries. The launch time feels about 10x faster.

Ashanmaril2• 5 years ago

Boy, the font size on this blog is... something!

robertlf2• 5 years ago

This guy seriously needs to learn how to style paragraphs. No one wants to read edge-to-edge.

ksubedi• 5 years ago

Hey "This guy" here, any suggestions on how to style them better? My blog is still a work in progress, but I am always looking for ways to improve things.

Ashanmaril2• 5 years ago

Shrink the 1.7em font-size, it's way too big for reading

I think that's honestly a bigger issue than paragraph width

qbasic_forever• 5 years ago

If you're rolling CSS, etc. yourself work through this free resource: https://practicaltypography.com/ You will learn a ton in a short time.

Alternatively grab a design system built by someone who already took care of all the typography decisions.

rsweeney21• 5 years ago

The typography looks nice, but it is not optimized for reading.

If you want something that will work well, copy the font and color styles from medium or substack. They've done all the research for you.

Here's a full list of the issues

- There's not enough contrast. The text color needs to be darker.

- The font is too large.

- The paragraph width is too wide

- The font weight is too light

singhrac• 5 years ago

The advice to read Practical Typography is good, but ironically not super practical. It would be a lot of time invested for a small practical benefit in this narrow situation.

Personally, I think you could increase the contrast between text and whitespace more (i.e. use a darker font color, maybe #222), shrink the font-size a little as the other comment said, and most importantly, set a max-width so that the text doesn't expand arbitrarily when viewed on larger screens. 700 or 900px feels nice to me.

belltaco• 5 years ago

I saw the thin grey on white hard to read font and immediate thought "must be a web designer using Mac OS" and wasn't surprised to learn I was right.

A good start is using an Accessibility Contrast Checker. https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

MasterScrat• 5 years ago

I don't understand what you mean?

dwb• 5 years ago

You can indicate how wide you prefer your paragraphs to be by sizing your browser window appropriately.

robertlf2• 5 years ago

This guy needs to learn how to style paragraphs. No one wants to read edge-to-edge.

greendave• 5 years ago

And this guy needs to avoid posting the same comment twice...

cosmotic2• 5 years ago

I feel like the people that complain about this are the ones who have a hard time changing their workflows to use the TouchBar, and still do things the old school way using function keys

This was particularly painful to read. The mandatory new option that is the touchbar upended what was working fine for something that, for touch typists, is totally inferior. There's no feedback! This is a foundational aspect of usability; for apple to ignore this is a huge mistake.

issa5• 5 years ago

I could not agree more. Taking away the volume buttons seems like such a small change, but I mess with volume 100x times a day and it went from something that requires one touch without looking to multiple touches and a lot of activating SIRI by mistake. I get why people make fun of such complaints, but it's a very front-and-center pain point.

ladberg• 5 years ago

Protip: You can control the volume in one touch by starting at the volume icon and swiping left or right!

sohooo• 5 years ago

Also not a fan of the touchbar, but since I learned that you can tap on volume and immediately slide left/right, it's ok for me.

dpkonofa4• 5 years ago

How do you figure? Press and slide to your desired volume in one motion. The new volume control is one of the reasons I now prefer the Touch Bar (in addition to scrubbing through media). I used to have to tap the volume button multiple times to get to my desired volume level but now I just tap/swipe and I'm done.

Edit: Looks like everyone else already said the same thing. Sorry!

rurp• 5 years ago

Taking away the volume buttons seems like such a small change

I honestly wouldn't even say it's that small of a change. Apple took an extremely common activity that worked without a thought and turned it into something you constantly have to look at and think about. This is especially annoying in the context of the posted article, where saving fractions of a second opening an app is one of the biggest pluses listed. At least to me, the former is much worse than the latter is beneficial.

Tsiklon• 5 years ago

Very first thing I did with my machine was remove Siri from the Touch Bar, you can customise the layout in the keyboard preferences if you haven’t already. But I agree, real bad default

ravedave5• 5 years ago

The touch escape button is the worst thing ever. I accidentally touch it, or when you need it because something's locked up, it's locked up too.

lyptt3• 5 years ago

I'm glad Apple reverted this with the second incarnation of the touch bar. You get a physical escape key on all M1 machines.

lowbloodsugar2• 5 years ago

I am so glad my M1 Air does not have a touch bar. I use my i9 pro almost exclusively with a magic keyboard (which has function keys). Die Touch Bar, die!

jbpnoy6fifty• 5 years ago

I'm one of the few many who actually like the touchbar. I use it all the time for changing screenshot capture modes. The volume problem doesn't bother me. I also re-binded escape to caps lock so I don't have the infuriating escape button issue, especially when toggling Vim modes.

One issue though, is that the touch app crashes sometimes and I need to cycle it's service. This happens rarely since I have updated to catalina 10.15.7, however, previously I would encounter the issue every month

haswell4• 5 years ago

This was my initial reaction as well, because I absolutely loathe the touch bar.

One thing I've been pondering - I've been asking myself: "why on earth would someone actually like the touchbar...ever?". And I wonder if the answer has something to do with the new generation of technologists. The generation that has been using touch on phones/tablets from the beginning of their technology journey.

I have no idea if this has merit, but as someone who hasn't looked at a keyboard while typing in two decades (unless it has a touchbar), that's the only thing I can imagine. Maybe I'd be ok with it if I grew up with it.

chrisseaton4• 5 years ago

"why on earth would someone actually like the touchbar...ever?"

Because it's programmable. I'm a programmer. I like things to be programmable.

I've got no hope of remembering what a key like F6 means in a given context - it's a meaningless number. The Touch Bar lets me have context-sensitive keys I can actually understand and use.

canthonytucci2• 5 years ago

I am a vim user for many years who loves the Touch Bar now that I have my escape key back.

I like adjusting brightness and volume with a slider. You can tap and hold the brightness or volume icon on the touch bar and slide it to where you want. Repeatedly tapping physical buttons feels vulgar by comparison.

I like seeing the progress and having transport controls of my full screen videos.

I like having the little animation draw my attention when I can use touchid for something.

In general it feels futuristic, fun, and like a way better use of the space than physical keys that I would almost never use.

If you’re someone who uses the function keys (JetBrains users maybe?) I can see feeling the same way I did about esc.

To me, using function keys is un-apple-ish.

I have command, control, and option keys that allow me to be quite expressive without moving my hands away from the home area of the board.

Perhaps those with larger hands can reach the function keys without disrupting their positioning. For me it is not possible.

At that point I may as well reach for a mouse or a touchpad.

emkoemko• 5 years ago

i can't see how... touch has so many downsides vs a feedback physical button. One day maybe we will get best of both worlds dynamic buttons that morph the screen so you get tactile feeling of buttons and no actuation until they are physically pushed.

its like how roku tv offers remote control app for phones.. vs a physical device that you can change volume, channels etc without even looking at the device and in the dark, every time i used the app i had to see where to press couldn't do it blindly because i had no idea if i was pushing anything or the wrong button. How can anyone like touch interfaces if it could be done with physical buttons?

mplewis• 5 years ago

I liked the touchbar, and I worked to make it the best it could be. I used BetterTouchTool and spent tons of time hacking my preferred widgets in – Spotify, weather, calendar, etc.

And then I bought a 2021 MacBook Air, without a touchbar, and I found it so much more pleasant. I find the touchbar to be a failed experiment. I no longer want one ever again. I just want buttons for my brightness and music.

hc-taway4• 5 years ago

I have to disable most of the Touch Bar (set it not to change with context, and replace most of it with a blank "spacer") to make it usable. I tend to just barely brush it when striking number keys during normal typing (which happens a lot for parens and such when programming—and just now, in fact) which makes it do crazy stuff like open iTunes (because I "pressed" the media play button). Real buttons don't do that because you have to push down on them to activate them, not ever-so-slightly brush the bottom edge, which is why I'd never noticed, in my 25ish years of touch-typing, that I did that, until I used a TouchBar MacBook.

I also have to disable force-touch (or whatever it's called on there) on the trackpad, for models that have that, or else my drag-&-drop success rate is reduced from about 100% to more like 30%. Took me quite a while to figure out why that was happening. Luckily I have no clue why I'd want that feature in the first place, so I don't miss it. I don't have any kind of motor-function disorder, I just can't drag-&-drop while maintaining perfectly even pressure, I guess.

gonehome• 5 years ago

I'd bet that Apple is killing the touch bar in the next hardware design revision. [0]

They kept the same body while changing out the chip, I suspect the next update will bring the end of the Touchbar.

The M1 is awesome though - it makes the Intel MBA seem like garbage. I was helping my SO set up some stuff for a presentation (Zoom, Mmhmm) and the Intel MBA fan was screaming, the video had unusable lag, the entire thing was locking up.

We switched to my M1 with no fan and everything was fast and flawless.

Meanwhile Intel is pushing nonsense like this: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/02/08/2221233/intel-b...

Intel is in trouble - this is an e-risk for their business.

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/15/apple-removing-touch-ba...

issa5• 5 years ago

I would be pretty upset if this was my primary development machine. A lot of minor issues, but enough that I still rely on my older machine frequently. Definitely improving, but I'd give it a few more months. I'm not saying there aren't solutions to the issues I'm having, but there are enough small ones that it hasn't been worth the time to chase down each one. Examples include: - multiple monitor support - Facetime issues - Xcode cannot connect to my phone - start up is fast, but wake-from-sleep is slow - an ESC key is nice, but I would still like volume/mute buttons. Especially in COVID times where I am muting/unmuting even more than usual.

The positives are that it is very fast and battery life is great!

derefr• 5 years ago

start up is fast, but wake-from-sleep is slow

That’s surprising; “instant wake” is an advertised feature of the AS Macs.

Are you actually referring to how long it takes to get back to the desktop from the Lock Screen? If so, do you perhaps have lots and lots of Chrome tabs open, more than fit in memory, such that some are hibernated; and do you frequently put your Mac to sleep, change its power state (plug/unplug), then wake it up again? If so, that’s Chrome blocking wake by attempting to wake up all the hibernated tabs to tell them the power state changed. I get that all the time on my 2016 MacBook.

issa5• 5 years ago

It's not Chrome. If I kill all programs and put my M1 and my 2017 intel to sleep... I can touch the finger print sensor on the M1, then touch the one on the Intel. The intel will be up and running while the M1 is still waking up. It's just a few seconds, but it's a noticeable.

boardwaalk2• 5 years ago

I’ve had people, before Apple Silicon came out, tell me I was full of it when I said all evidence pointed to it being pretty damn impressive. So I feel a bit of schadenfreude seeing these posts.

I still don’t have a new MacBook with it because they don’t support multiple external monitors yet, but hey, maybe this year.

bhouston• 5 years ago

Then get the MacMini. it is beautiful with 2 4K screens. Super cheap too.

boardwaalk2• 5 years ago

That turns things into a mess for me, as I already have a USB-C dock I use for a work laptop and the Mac Mini doesn’t support dual displays via USB-C alone.

bestinterest2• 5 years ago

Excited for Q3/4 release of the new MacBook this year. I believe a nice screen redesign is in the works which will get rid of the outdated bezels and I'm hoping I can connect two displays. Throw in a possible few more cores for the M1X 16inch version and give me a 32GB ram option and sounds like a pc which will last for many years.

lmarcos• 5 years ago

sounds like a pc which will last for many years

I really want this as well, but I'm a bit sceptical: would any company release a product soooo good so that their users don't need to buy new models of such product for many years?

I still have a 2015 MBP that works like the first day although I would like to increase the disk and ram. 5 years with the same model; that's a lot. I know many people who replaces their laptops every 2 or 3 years. Now, I have the impression that a model like the one you just described, is a model that could easily "last" for more than 5 years without trouble. Wouldn't that hurt Apple's sales long-term?

the_reformation• 5 years ago

Keeps you in the ecosystem, on Apple's services. And a top-end MBP will cost >$3k, which I don't think people buying laptops every 2-3 years spend.

bestinterest2• 5 years ago

I personally think that the 2015 MBP was the last best value MacBook that would of been the one to last you plenty of years and looks like it has for you. The MacBooks since then have not had much of an noticeable improvement (other than new M1's) and even regressions with the keyboard issues, heat issues etc.

I'm hoping this years gen will be like that 2015 model. But I share your concerns, knowing Apple they will gimp it somewhere like not allowing 2 monitors or limiting to 16GB then have next years model have it which will prob increase sales by a ton long term.

dpkonofa4• 5 years ago

would any company release a product soooo good so that their users don't need to buy new models of such product for many years?

Every person that I know with a Mac or an iPhone still has it and it's usable for years after they're done with it. I know some people that are still using their iPhone 6S because it has a headphone jack and that phone is almost 7 years old at this point.

hc-taway4• 5 years ago

That they last so long (and, consequently, have high resale value even when they're several years old) is part of why Apple can charge so much in the first place. The resale-value thing also helps people justify those 2-3 year replacement cycles.

rahoulb• 5 years ago

I literally just switched from a 2012 Mac Mini to a stop-gap 2018 model (waiting for Docker on the M1 before I move to that).

That’s almost 9 years on one machine and I didn’t have to switch; I just wanted to dabble in the latest iOS dev on Big Sur (which is unsupported on the 2012 model)

octos4murai2• 5 years ago

I have only two nitpicks with my M1 Mac: (1) it's not a good fit for virtualization (whether docker or VMs) -- but this limitation is well-known, and (2) the only time I see slowdowns is occasionally when opening a new tab in Safari -- even when almost nothing else is running. The second one also happened on my Intel Mac, just a bummer that the issue hasn't magically gone away.

Beyond that, I wouldn't change a thing about this machine. Very easy to recommend!

lyptt3• 5 years ago

Have you given UTM (https://github.com/utmapp/UTM) a try? It can run ARM and Intel virtual machines. It's basically a wrapper around QEMU, and it can be a little unstable depending on your chosen configuration, but it'll work in a pinch.

octos4murai2• 5 years ago

I suspect I’d need something more mature and performant but I appreciate the recommendation!

chrisjarvis• 5 years ago

the opening a tab in safari one gets me pretty often too. On both m1 and intel machine. Very strange!

chucktorres• 5 years ago

I trimmed down on my bookmarks, switched to a blank page on new tab, and restricted history to only go back a month. Also disabled most extensions. The problem seems to have gotten better for me.

rvanmil• 5 years ago

Very happy with my MacBook Air M1, working mostly on TypeScript Node.js and React projects.

The first couple of weeks I used the Rosetta Terminal as described in this and many other blog post, until I found out this was not necessary at all for Node.js as described over here: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm/issues/2350#issuecomment-73413....

The only blocking issue was Docker so I used VSCode remote until they released the M1 preview. So with that and the release of HomeBrew 3.0.0 last month and many macOS apps adding M1 support, everything is now running smoothly for me and I think it's a really great machine to use as a developer.

Also, the battery life truly is amazing, and boy am I glad I finally got rid of that touch bar and that ridiculous butterfly keyboard.

lowbloodsugar2• 5 years ago

I play games on my Air, with it in my lap. Cannot do that with my i9 as it will make me sterile with the heat!

These are games like factorio and CIV6. Only two years ago, a similarly priced (~$1000) dell ultralight was unable to play CIV6 at all (ok, it managed 1 frame every 2 seconds). My M1 Air plays it for hours.

lyptt3• 5 years ago

My M1 MacBook Pro's been an excellent purchase. It's incredibly fast, and silent even when I'm running intensive builds e.g. building new versions of LLVM. Best investment I've made this year.

Tronno• 5 years ago

It's hard to take the author seriously when he gushes over the joys of using the touch bar, the life-changing productivity gains of having a faster computer, and - yes - the benefits of down-sizing to a smaller screen. Apple can do no wrong, it seems.

sroussey• 5 years ago

TL;DR — if you don’t use docker, things are good.

dwheeler• 5 years ago

Only 2 ports? My Mac has all 4 USB-C ports in use, two of those connect to hubs so I can multiplex them, and I have to unplug something to connect my backup drive because 4 isn't enough. I look forward to a more reasonable number of external ports.

Experience with Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Pro as a Software Developer

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