I have been using M1 for 1.5 months. Here is my experience as a coding SaaS founder.
I have bought M1 MacBook Air 13" 16GB In January 2021. Here are my thoughts on this machine so far.
⚡️ Speed
Aww yeah, it is lightning fast!
My daily setup: Postgres, VScode (+48 plugins), Sublime Text, Slack, Discord, Spotify, Thunderbird, Telegram, Chrome (+8 extensions), Firefox, iTerm, Figma, Alfred. All simultaneously.
Not a single freeze so far. Each app opens instantly.
My friend-pythonist is using an 8GB version. It works slick too.
🔌 Apps
As you know, there is a chip incompatibility issue. And there is something called Rosetta to fix it.
So I expected some problems with apps.
But in reality, I did not have to care about this. Everything just works. There is not a single difference between M1 and Intel to me.
💔 What went wrong
My biggest fear was not being able to launch my development environment.
When I typed brew install python@3.7 in the terminal I got this error: "python@3.7: The x86_64 architecture is required for this software.".
It instantly made me pale because this means I will have to carry 2 laptops to be able to code my product 😩
The problem was solved quickly by upgrading the project to a newer version of Python. Thank goodness our dependencies did not mess up because of the update.
The next problem was nodejs v11 which was needed to launch the product locally. yarn start took ~2 hours (HOURS!) to launch. Each update took ~5 minutes to compile. The development process was awful. I got pale again 😩
The problem was solved by moving to a newer nodejs version. Again, the dependencies did not break up. But the things could easily mess up because nodejs dependencies are complicated as hell.
Now it compiles instantly, yarn build takes 30 sec.
🪶 Keyboard
It is much better than the previous generations have. Apple has fixed it.
I can code, I can type emails, I can write stories.
It is not as brilliant as the old one from my MacBook Pro 2012, but still fine.
💻 Why Air, not Pro
AFAIK, the Pro version has these differences: better battery, better mic + sound, more ports (+2). I did not find these features significant enough to pay extra. And I also dislike Touch Bar.
Original thread: https://twitter.com/alexanderisora/status/1369533810833035264
still better than any project in xcode 😏
Ha-ha 😂
M1 scared me away as a developer so I am now a loyal System76 customer :)
I've been thinking about upgrading but wanted to wait for the supportability concerns to settle, particularly for Go (my primary programming language). Looks like most things have been updated pretty quickly, would just need to upgrade EVERYTHING
I've been using my M1 Pro extensively, and I absolutely love it.
I've only experienced one incompatibility so far. It was with Bazel libraries that hard-code the specific architectures they support. I've been able to work around it, so I'm not worried about it. I imagine they'll be updated pretty quickly. If you're thinking, "wow, that's really niche," you're right. 99+% of things work without even thinking about it.
Ironically, the only problem I've experienced is with the machine's efficiency. I had some zombie webpack instances caught in an infinite loop. They drained my battery over the course of 4 hours. I didn't notice until the fan finally kicked on after hours of this. With my old laptop, I would have noticed pretty quickly when the fan turned on after a minute.
Fans have always been a good signal that something is not going right.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago
MacBook Air M1 does not have a fan. It gets slightly warm when I build something often.
I did not get any trouble with it so far.