Ask HN: How do you like developing on an M1 Mac so far?

I have the M1 MacBook Air and it’s best computer I’ve ever owned, hands down. Brought me back to Mac from my X1 carbon 6th gen running Linux (arch btw).<p>The machine itself?<p><pre><code> - Faster than blue blazes - Dead silent - Cold to the touch (even when cranking) - Has excellent screen and keyboard - No touchbar - Has bonkers battery life - Comes with tiny a&#x2F;c adapter that charges it quickly </code></pre> When I say fast I mean desktop processor fast. It hauls ass.<p>I do all of my development remotely via ssh and local forwards so the different platform doesn’t affect me at all.<p>Kinda bummed that I can only hook one LG5k display in at a time but whatever, that is kind of a fringe desire anyway. If there was a 14&#x2F;16&quot; version I&#x27;d throw money at Apple again.<p>Once I compared zoom using 120% cpu on my intel Mac to 30% cpu on my apple silicon Mac it was game over. The processors are just more efficient in so many ways. I&#x27;ve been pretty jaded on hardware recently but this made me sit up and go &quot;holy crap&quot; everything else just became obsolete.<p>Unless you have something x86 specific you need to be doing locally or need a huge screen do not hesitate to buy this machine. Apple has knocked it out of the park.

I got mine this week, I&#x27;m surprised it doesn&#x27;t even blow hot air while building node from source.<p>However, I am greatly disappointed in the fact that I cannot use both usb-c for displays, only one of them. I did not know of this limitation until I discovered things were not working as expected.<p>Everything is super responsive, it&#x27;s far better than the 2014 mac mini (4GB of ram) with 2020 SSD.<p>Rosetta 2 seems to work without any hitches so far.<p>I tried running some iOS apps, but it seems the ones available don&#x27;t run all that well. From the ones I could install, it is nice to receive app notifications!

- I had some trouble building the Rust lang toolchain (wanted to work on a PR), haven&#x27;t tried again (used my other machine instead).<p>- The battery life is great.<p>- Something I wouldn&#x27;t have thought is how much I enjoy that the machine is not heating up under stress. Difficult to describe, but that is really really nice<p>- I have the MBP and the only time I heard the fan was when I compiled the Rust toolchain.<p>- Tried to run Linux in Parallels but that didn&#x27;t work (some sort of weird error, didn&#x27;t investigate further)<p>- Within Xcode&#x2F;Swift everything works as expected, just much faster ;)<p>- My M1 has problems when I&#x27;m connecting my external 5K display. It works great, but when I put the M1 to sleep and wake it up again it can&#x27;t find the display anymore. Even plugging it in &#x2F; out doesn&#x27;t help. I read somewhere that that&#x27;ll soon be fixed with a software update.<p>- I had higher hopes for the ability to run iOS apps. I really wanted Netflix and Amazon Alexa to work. I hope they&#x27;ll reverse their stance to not support M1s at some point.<p>Overall, I&#x27;m very happy with the M1, but I still have a 2018 Mac mini that continues to be my main machine. I bought the M1 because I have an upcoming Mac app that I&#x27;ve worked on for ~2 years and I wanted to make sure it works on M1 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyperdeck.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hyperdeck.io</a>).

Also M1 owners, I would also like to know how much 8&#x2F;16 GB memory has affected your workflow&#x2F;productivity assuming you previously had at least 32GB RAM?<p>e.g. Those who never closed their apps before, kept several browsers with several dozen tabs, Note taking apps, IDE, VM etc. all the time.<p>Is lighting fast opening of apps on M1 = Never having to close the apps in any machine with large RAM?

I got mine on release day. Go debugger support took a while, but now it&#x27;s my dream computer.<p>My biggest complaint is that it doesn&#x27;t warm my lap. The battery life makes up for that though.<p>My other computer has a 3900x and it&#x27;s been getting very little use even though I&#x27;m homebound.

It&#x27;s a great little machine. I&#x27;ve been sticking with Go, C++ (with CMake, mostly) and JS in the browser. The worst problem for me so far has been that getting bazel to work properly has been a bigger job than anticipated. Its belief that macos implies x86_64 turns out to be hard-wired all over the place.

I think it&#x27;ll be another month or two at least before doing scientific programming will be pleasant due to the lack of support from e.g. numpy and hacked versions of gfortran being used for R.

My experience has been quite good, Mac Mini M1, 8GB RAM. It&#x27;s very fast while running many applications, no CPU throttling, excellent thermal control.<p>- VS Code Insiders works well for Web, Nodejs, and Ruby.<p>- iTerm, Alfred, and Dash all work as expected.<p>- Homebrew support is excellent.<p>- Only a few issues with needing to re-install updated Ruby gems or Nodejs packages due to incompatibility issues from native C extensions, i.e. FFI (ruby), Sharp (nodejs), libvips (c++).<p>- CPU intensive tasks are very fast compared to a 2015 MacBook Pro.<p>- Input&#x2F;Output is limited, and you will probably have to buy a dock and deal with display issues if you want more than one external monitor. I am still dealing with this.<p>Overall I would recommend, compatibility is 95% excellent. The feel of the Mac is satisfying and problems can be solved within an hour most times.<p>If you need many monitors for your work, you many want to wait until the compatibility improves, or buy a dock and roll the dice.

Gosh I love it so much. I’ve been doing golang and c&#x2F;c++ on it and everything is buttery smooth. Few hiccups in the beginning with Rosetta but making sure I just run terminal with it ticked on makes everything fine. Once the Firefox M1 support came, I was very pleased. Everything is snappy, quiet, and light. I’d much rather trade in my mid-2019 16” rmbp for another of these at home. Battery life is amazing. 16gb hasn’t been an issue for me ever; it makes me actually question if the OS is just better at managing memory more recently; that being said I don’t do any AV workloads which would necessitate more RAM over programming tasks.<p>I am wanting to get virtualbox running though

VMs work. Qemu is working with patches. You have to build it though. None of the releases seems to be patched yet. There is an early preview of Parallels. Both Linux and Windows on Arm are working. Docker has an early release as well. There are few prebuilt projects on Github too:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;evansm7&#x2F;vftool" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;evansm7&#x2F;vftool</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;KhaosT&#x2F;SimpleVM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;KhaosT&#x2F;SimpleVM</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ubenmackin&#x2F;ACVM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ubenmackin&#x2F;ACVM</a>

So far have been very happy :)<p>Still waiting on native VS Code but rosetta works fine.<p>Recently after several big apps like Chrome, iTerm and Slack updated to native binaries everything has been _very_ smooth.<p>I use docker heavily with zero issues - arm64 or amd64.

I was literally just coming on here to ask this question! Specifically, whether or now homebrew is happy with the m1.

I love it, but I find I don&#x27;t really use it. My 16&quot; MBP has a bigger screen, 4 usb ports so I can charge, two-factor auth, external microphone and external webcam at the same time. The downside is that it&#x27;s much louder under load, but that is apparently worth it for me.<p>Also the 16&quot; was much more expensive, but and it has much shorter time on battery - but I already paid for it and I&#x27;m usually close to a power plug anyways.<p>Maybe I&#x27;d use the M1 more if zoom was less prevalent.

Up until it died, the MacBook was super nice to work on, super fast in waking from sleep, and pleasant to use in all lighting conditions except direct sunlight obliquely incident to the screen (in which case the sunlight made all the dust and fingerprints on the screen extremely bright and opaque).<p>Obviously I can&#x27;t run my intel-based VMs, but I was able to run all my web development toolchains: Django, Vuex&#x2F;Flask, PHP, Postgres&#x2F;MySQL&#x2F;SQLite.<p>I also play games: mostly KSP. The 8GB RAM isn&#x27;t enough for a small KSP save (a dozen flights, a few hundred parts), and I had to restart KSP every couple of hours due to memory pressure.<p>Best computer I&#x27;ve ever owned, but I&#x27;ve already killed one inside two weeks of owning it and the replacement is going out the same way: something in my environment or in the way I use it caused the M1 to kill itself.<p>It starts off as the occasional panic&#x2F;reboot. Continues to manifest as any activity that requires touching the disk ends up locking the computer up for tens of seconds (spinning beachball cursor, but you can&#x27;t move the cursor with trackpad or external mouse). Ultimately the MacBook just dies in the middle of whatever it was you were doing, and nothing you or the Apple Genius can do will convince it to boot again.

I&#x27;ve got the <i>base model M1 Air (8GB, 8&#x2F;7 cores)</i>. I sold 2020 models of the Intel Air and ThinkPad L14 (Ryzen 7 Pro) to fund the purchase and have no regrets.<p>- Cross-compiling code written in Go (latest beta is native ARM) takes less than 2 seconds (total) even though in that time it is building all 4 platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac ARM, Mac Intel).<p>- VS Code is more responsive than the Ryzen 7 Pro was (obviously subjective). The Insiders build is native ARM.<p>- DotNet 5 (Core, which is Intel only until .Net 6) builds apps as fast as the Ryzen 7, and running my own C# web sites&#x2F;services is indistinguishable from it.<p>- After decades of coding, 2 of them with C#, I&#x27;m fast. So I flip between VS Code, Terminal, and Brave, at a very rapid pace as I iterate code. Not once have I been slowed down on this 8GB machine.<p>- Node and Python are working great. Node via Homebrew is ARM. Python 3.9.1 was already installed (I&#x27;ve not checked if it is ARM as it is behaving perfectly).<p>- Running `npm install` subjectively feels far faster.<p>- The keyboard is very good (not ThinkPad quality, but still better than most). It&#x27;s using the new type that the 2020 Intel Air got, not the one from the last few years with all the issues.<p>- The keyboard backlight keys are no longer there, so unless you open up the preferences pane you have to rely on the auto-ambient-sensing, but that is working perfectly.<p>- Charges off any decent USB-C charger, not just the Apple one it comes with.<p>- Developing for a full day of combined Go and DotNet Core eats about 40% battery. Probably only that much because Core is under Rosetta. Still runs cold though.<p>- It never heats up, except for when using the non-ARM Go in which case it occasionally hangs and if I don&#x27;t kill Terminal it starts eating 1% every few minutes. Nothing else has misbehaved at all.<p>As an aside, and I know you were only asking about dev work but it may help provide context to others, running DiRT 4 (rallying) on it for an hour only used about 4% of battery life, operating at high res high quality with no lag, and the Air never even got warm. The amazing thing about that is that this was running under Rosetta.<p>So this was emulating Intel. Running a game better than the Intel Air 2020 did, whilst under emulation, on the cheapest M1, silent, cold, using only 4% battery for an hour. Almost unbelievable.<p>EDIT: It also plays Monument Valley (iPad or iOS version, not sure which) perfectly, in full screen with mouse support. Bonus.

I had mine for over a month now and it’s great. Development is fast there is some libraries that are not compiled for M1 yet so if you use package managers like brew etc it might need to compile some libraries from source. But once everything is installed running code is extremely quick. You can have 100s of browser tabs without a noticeable drop in performance, I use a MacBook Air M1.

I just got started with the M1 Mini, 16GB RAM.<p>I develop almost exclusively in Rust. Compared to my $1800 work MacBook Pro (early 2020, two fans, 16GB RAM), all my Rust projects literally compile twice as fast on 1.49.<p>The desktop seems snappy, but I haven&#x27;t left it on long enough to see if it slows over time. Very satisfied with it so far!

When it works, it’s a dream. Fast, cool. Rosetta 2 works quickly and well. I’ve found M1 builds for things like ffmpeg, VS Code, TeX.<p>The #1 problem is external monitor support. I use a Seiki 4K monitor. If you unplug it, the laptop regularly becomes unresponsive and kerneltask eats all your cycles. If it sleeps with a monitor on and wakes with it off, that’s almost a sure beach ball.<p>Rumors are that a fix is coming, but you never know. You can see from the other comments that in general external monitor support is erratic, and that’s very bad for a 13” laptop. I’ve taken to rebooting between monitor unplugs. Very obnoxious and I’m infuriated having to do it.<p>But then when it all works, it’s pretty sweet, so all is forgiven. So basically, it’s a slightly abusive relationship. Buyer beware.

Mac Mini, 16GB RAM.<p>Managed to compile FreePascal and Lazarus for M1 (aarch64); was fairly straight forward.<p>I’ve been playing &#x2F; prototyping with FPC&#x2F;Lazarus over the holidays so it’s nice to run without Rosetta.<p>Compiles are super fast, but of course fpc&#x2F;Lazarus is pretty quick already. ;-)

Yeah it’s really nice. Xcode runs really fast. Wish it had more ports. That’s my only gripe.

I mostly work in VSCode, the latest insiders build work much faster compared to my 2019 MBP. Browsing is also significantly faster with Chrome.<p>I have tried the Docker beta, it runs well, even with 8gb, but being limited to ARM images limits its use.

M1 8Gb mini here. Main desktop machine. Writing Go on it mostly. Zero problems. Fast, reliable. Probably the best computer I&#x27;ve ever owned. I am using VMs in AWS for a lot of more complex development work though so it&#x27;s fair to say that this is a limited terminal machine with some local development being done. The only third party applications I have installed are Zoom, Slack, MacVim, Go, Terraform, AWS CLI as an example. I am not using homebrew etc as I don&#x27;t need to.<p>Main thing: it just works, silently and quickly!

I don’t use my MacBook Air M1 for development, but I believing positive reinforcement so I need to add to all praise here, who knows someone from Apple sees it.<p>This machine is so super <i>nice</i>. The keyboard is awesome, the dedicated emoji button is useful. But the cherry on top is insane performance and insane battery life.<p>To me, this machine is to other laptops as the iPhone was to all smartphone before it.

When building Tensorflow from source (because you have to, to get it working even with Rosetta 2) was frustratingly slow, and the whole computer became unusable. After more than an hour of waiting, I stopped the bazel build process. Which reminds me, I&#x27;m going trigger the build now and go for a walk...

It’s pretty amazing. I’ve had it since launch and it was rougher at first, but at this point most things are native. I really miss having a Windows VM and I opted for 8gb RAM which means a lot of swapping and I’m a little worried about the NVMe drive failing.

Web development - works great through Homebrew and Rosetta. Native versions are available of most JetBrains IDEs, and I can&#x27;t really complain. However, my workflow doesn&#x27;t use Docker, so I can&#x27;t speak to how well that works.

I’ve been using MacBook Air.<p>Battery life - I had bigger expectations :) , it’s indeed nice but still seems to run off quicker than reviews and reports I have read.<p>Compiling - that’s where it really chimes. I actually get better build times than my desktop 10700k machine (both with Xcode 12.2 and compiling same archs.<p>The hiccups, As we develop audio plug-ins (which are dlls). it seems that Apple now has extra XPC services ‘sandboxing’ those. (also for native arm64 binaries). So far, so good. but... with extra hardened runtime, it’s not debuggable! so unless we go the SIP off way we cannot debug under it (which is needed since it might behave differently).<p>I think you should focus the questions on what development tasks you expect. Since people developing for web will have different hiccups than people developing native macOS or iOS.<p>It’s still an ‘insider’ machine. :) Many major apps are still insider or test&#x2F;tech builds. Docker, Parallels, Android Emulators, VS Code, etc...<p>TL;DR - it’s the bleeding edge. prepare to search workarounds for tiny issues while installing.<p>having a machine not frying your ‘laps’ and silent (no fan) while out-performing my desktop 10700k in many tasks is quite amazing.

Depends on what you need to develop. The M1 is great if you do web development with NodeJS style tools or Apple App Store development but don&#x27;t need to run an x86 Windows VM to see exactly how Windows browsers render your site: Windows browsers which run on 90%+ of this planet&#x27;s desktops, important corporate customer desktops in particular.<p>The M1 is not so great if:<p>- You want to develop real-time raytracing. The M1 using the Metal API does 3.6 FPS (20.1 million rays per second) while the RTX 2070 does 135.5 FPS (757 megarays&#x2F;sec) on one benchmark: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.willusher.io&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;20&#x2F;rt-dive-m1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.willusher.io&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2020&#x2F;12&#x2F;20&#x2F;rt-dive-m1</a><p>- You need reliable ECC memory and&#x2F;or a corruption resistant filesystem like ZFS&#x2F;BTRFS&#x2F;ReFS. (You can get ECC on serious Thinkpads (X1&#x2F;P15&#x2F;P17), Dells, and HPs designed for science and engineering, and also RTX graphics, Cuda machine learning, etc., and run both Windows and Linux.)<p>- You need hi-performance x86 Linux VMs to compile and test your production back-end code locally on your device.<p>- You need a multidisk RAID drive configuration (available in laptops above mentioned) which allows you to keep working if one disk fails.<p>- You need to be able to quickly and inexpensively field-service&#x2F;replace a failed disk drive, bad memory stick, broken screen, or damaged keyboard.<p>- You need to be able to quickly swap an old battery for a fresh one. (I replaced the battery in my MacBook Pro when it swelled up and almost cracked the trackpad glass; I had to use acetone nail polish remover to release the adhesive Apple uses to glue the battery into the case. Apple uses glue for everything these days and opposes right-to-repair legislation.)<p>- You need to be able to use portable graphics APIs such as Vulkan.<p>- You need to run industry standard CAD&#x2F;CAM applications performantly and cost effectively.<p>- You want to develop VR applications.<p>- You want to run an 8K display. If you see a 280dpi Dell 8K next to a ~220dpi Apple 5K&#x2F;6K you see there is no comparison. The Apple &quot;retina&quot; renders font edges softer than print.<p>- You need a device your device vendor allows you to configure to not phone home to said device vendor&#x27;s servers. If you buy Windows Enterprise or Red Hat Enterprise or Ubuntu this level of privacy is officially supported. Apple aggressively markets itself as pro-privacy but does not offer this: your M1 will be sending quite a few packets to Apple-owned IP ranges.<p>- You need a device you can constructively criticize on internet forums when it doesn&#x27;t work well for doing anything other than desktop-and-mobile Webkit webdev and Apple App Store development. If you ever need to share your frustration with your M1 on Reddit or HN you risk instant downvoting.

So far I have done Go, little Rust, python, some docker stuff, etc. Its awesome. I have 8gb M1 air and its seriously faster than my 16gb MBP with an intel i7.

I see that the M1 Mac Mini is only available with 8GB RAM. Is that likely to remain as a market segmentation thing, or could a 16GB Mini be available soonish?

No OP but looking for people with any reactions on using Docker, Node or Python on the M1? Likely going to get an M1 mini at some point.

VSCode remote plugin + a Linux server in the other room with dual Xeon and 64G RAM + Tailscale mesh VPN. Perfect for my use cases.

I’ve avoided installing Rosetta on mine by running betas of whatever it is, but it works well so far.<p>The battery life on the MBP is amazing.

I&#x27;m very ignorant of the M1, but heard it has some hardware optimizations for Mac OS. If I buy this laptop and install Windows on it (because of a need for specific software), does that largely defeat the purpose and significantly reduce the benefit of the Mac OS-specific hardware optimizations?

I have an M1 mini 2TB&#x2F;16GB arriving next week. Will add comments when I get it - my primary dev environment is Docker + JetBrains, so we&#x27;ll see how far I get in that.

Macports? I don&#x27;t brew