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A Developers perspective on the M1 MacBook Pro after 5 months of usage

Andrew Baisden on May 13, 2021

I purchased my new M1 MacBook Pro at the end of last year which was December 2020, and it arrived in January 2021. My previous laptop was a 2014 Ma...
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Amey Sunu

I have been using the MacBook Air M1 since February and hands down, it’s best device I have ever used. Xcode is super smooth and fast, and since the Air has no fans, there is not a single noise emitted, unlike my old 2019 MBP with the i9 that starts sounding like an airplane engine, the moment I open the 3rd or 4th Chrome tab.

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Dadci Raouf • Edited

You switched from a mbp 16 inch i9 to mbp 13inch m1? Am in the same place as you and im going in the m1 way πŸ˜€

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Amey Sunu

Yeah I did. It’s thermals are so bad, that it started causing me a lot of discomfort especially while using it on my lap. And boy the noise it makes lol. M1 is definitely way better.

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Ankit Tiwari

I have been using M1 MacBook Air Pro for 1 month and I am absolutely blown away by it. It doesn't feel like an upgrade, it feels like I am using something else.

VS Code takes a second to load and never slows down even for huge workspaces. Build time has been reduced by half or even less.

I haven't heard the fans yet. The battery lasts 24 hours even with heavy use.

It's unbelievable what Apple has done here.

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Andrew Baisden

There is only M1 MacBook Air and M1 MacBook Pro. If you have the Air then there are no fans to be heard πŸ˜‰

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Ankit Tiwari

Oops, I said Air Pro πŸ˜›

I have the Pro variant with 16 GB of Ram. I think the I haven't heard the fans yet because I haven't been able to push it to its limits.

The amount of softwares I run was impossible to run smoothly for my old 2019 Macbook Air but this machine doesn't even break a sweat.

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Rick Mills

I've been blown away by the M1 Macbook Air. I moved to it as my daily work mac having previously been on a 2016 touchbar 15" MBP.

I was a bit concerned about resources as I only went with the 8GB model - my fears were totally unwarranted, it's a beast of a machine and handles anything I throw at it with ease.

I pretty much always have PHP Storm (known to be VERY memory hungry), chrome, docker, iterm, sequel ace, Apple Music and a bunch of other stuff running and it rarely gets about 4-5GB of ram used and stays cold.

I know people say 8GB isn't enough and I think normally they'd be right, but the new architecture of these machines mean you can no longer compare the memory needed on an intel machine. You effectively need less than half of what you used to need as the OS is extremely memory efficient.

Apple redeemed themselves with these. The 2016 MBP was a massive disappointment, with its rather lacklustre touch bar, terribly flawed keyboard and the known thermal issues that meant the MBP was often hot enough to warm up a cup of coffee! These new machines are a whole different thing though, they've really outdone themselves.

One thing I keep thinking of. If this is the kind of performance we're getting with the first generation of their desktop chips, imagine what their true pro line of SOC's will be like!

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ankitamboli

I am thinking to buy M1 MacBook Air 8gb 256gb ssd
But am worried if the fan less laptop will degrade the m1 chip faster and also just 8gb ram might write a lot of swap memory on ssd (TBW), can u help me by telling whats ur tbw pls help

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Muhammad Faizan

Hello Everyone I am React Native Developer Wanted to buy Macbook but am confused between M1 Air and Pro I will be using both ios simulator and android emulator at the same time so which one will be good for me and also kindly mention is 8gb ram good or which one?
Kindly guide me

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Shivkumar Shivaji

I have an M1 Macbook Pro. Its great for dev usage.

However, it does not work for my complex docker setup. I have a container with pytorch and M1 with ARM does not work well with Pytorch at the moment. The other problem is that Java Native libraries are missing on the M1 Mac - see github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl3/issues/601

I admit that except the above 2 issues, the remaining docker containers and development environments work well. Its a bit sad that the pytorch build container does not work at the moment. Except those 2 issues, the M1 Mac's are great for dev.

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webdevnerdstuff

There is one giant elephant in the room that I see being a big problem for developers and Mac's with the M1/Pro/Max. VirtualBox does not have a version that works with the ARM chips yet. If you use Vagrant and VirtualBox all the time, then this is a significant issue.

I'm in the process of trying to get VMware or Parallels working with some of the projects I work on, but it has not been easy and I have yet to find a solution. Unfortunately to even test VMware or Parallels I think you need the paid version, which is costly when you are not even sure if it will be a good solution.

I'd love to hear others thoughts about this, and or what you are doing to get around this road block. I've been trying to get a work Laravel site using Homestead working, but so far haven't had any luck.

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Ernesto Gagliardi

Thanks you for sharing your experience with the new M1 MBP! Currently I'm using a 2019 MBP (latest with intel processor) and I think that I should wait a few years until change to M1 because of compatibilty and (most of it) to see how the market reacts to this new processor. Did you find any troubles when setting up your environment? (besides the thing you mention about android studio)

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Andrew Baisden

Nope I did not notice anything of significance it just felt like a normal installation.

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Mickael Naulet

Hello,
Have you testing with the new version of docker ?
I need to buy another computer but I am afraid I can't run my docker container, Il use phpfm8, mailcatcher, elasticsearch, nginx, mariadb.

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Andrew Baisden

I have not tried Docker yet but apparently it has support now docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/app...

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Mark Otway

I've been using docker on my M1 MBP for a few months and it works just fine.

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dc

Docker is my concern too. What images are you using? If there docker system works is there any incompatible images?

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Rick Mills

I've been using it for a while too, the only images that I've had issue with was the official MySQL ones, although MariaDB has worked fine. That being said I believe Oracle has now updated their images to support arm64 so these should now work fine, but not one I've tested out as MariaDB is practically the same thing.

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ΞΞΉΞΊΞ·Ο†ΟŒΟΞΏΟ‚ Βλάχος • Edited

Beautifuly put review, I have seen countless YouTube review and articles on the new M1 mackbooks but your just had more heart to it.

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pavan

I heard one has to have a paid software to run make virtual machines ? is there any alternative? This is definetly a huge downside for devs

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Pierre

Hey ! Does it support nodeJs ?

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Andrew Baisden

Yes it works perfectly.

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James Heggs

Is the dual monitor something they are going to address? Seems a shame to not support two monitors

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Andrew Baisden

Apparently Apple said they would fix it in a Big Sur update. Until then you can get it working by installing third-party drivers.