Apple Silicon M1: A Developer's Perspective

I&#x27;m a developer as well and don&#x27;t use apps like VSCode, or Java&#x2F;Gradle... but instead develop open source projects running Python, and Rust.<p>1. For my open source projects, running tests has sped up so much that I find it more of a joy to work on this projects now. Test suites that take ~60 seconds on my 2017 MacBook Pro i7, now take just ~15 seconds. That&#x27;s a HUGE win in the edit, run test suite cycle.<p>2. My Rust projects now compile in WAY less time. Something that used to take 3 minutes to compile + link for a debug build is now down to 40 seconds. Once again, this has increased my productivity in the edit, compile, test cycle.<p>For other projects like node&#x2F;npm the speedups are also massive and running various pipelines to go from source code to final deployable object is also much faster.<p>I use vim to develop, and it runs on Rosetta just fine, so I can continue to use all my existing plugins. I don&#x27;t extensively use docker containers, but for those I connect to the cloud instead of running them locally, which is a move I was already making even on my Intel based MacBook Pro.<p>I got the 16GB 13&quot; MacBook Pro. I, like the blog author, was thinking of this as a secondary laptop, something fun to have around, but I have hardly touched my old 15&quot; MacBook Pro because this one does everything I already need. And does it faster.<p>I&#x27;ve been living with 16GB of RAM forever, so maybe I am used to fitting in that memory space... I avoid Electron based apps like the plague, and with being able to run iPad&#x2F;iOS apps on the M1, I&#x27;ve been able to cut down even further since things like Authy are way faster to launch when they aren&#x27;t large Chrome based hogs.<p>I am looking forward to the 16&quot; MacBook Pro&#x27;s with Apple Silicon based processors, but only because I do miss the additional screen real-estate, and prefer the larger size. But the 13&quot; MacBook Pro M1 has been absolutely fantastic so far.

Personally can’t wait to upgrade. The point about 16GB being on the low side was nice to get confirmed. There has been a lot of conspiracy on 16GB being plenty enough, but as a developer I know that to future proof my next machine I would really like 64GB. I already have 16GB of ram on my 8 year old MacBook Pro.

&gt; Xcode runs FAST on the M1. Compiling the PSPDFKit PDF SDK (debug, arm64) can almost compete with the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro Apple offers to date, with 8:49 min vs 7:31 min. For comparison, my Hackintosh builds the same in less than 5 minutes.<p>This is telling just about how unrealistic Geekbench benchmarks, used by most reviewers, really are - they were all forecasting M1 completely humiliating everything from Intel and yet in practice it&#x27;s not quite right. It&#x27;s a dang impressive chip still though.

&gt; IntelliJ is working on porting the JetBrains Runtime to Apple Silicon. The apps currently work through Rosetta 2, however building via Gradle is extremely slow. Gradle creates code at runtime, which seems a particular bad combination with the Rosetta 2 ahead-of-time translation logic.<p>Java does not need to be run through emulation. Azul already published ARM64 Zulu builds for OpenJDK (here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.azul.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;zulu-community&#x2F;?package=jdk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.azul.com&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;zulu-community&#x2F;?package=jdk</a>) and they work great on the M1. I&#x27;m currently using IntelliJ running in emulation mode (an official release for the M1 was originally expected by the end of November) and but build&#x2F;run my projects on a local Zulu JVM with ARM64 support.

Not sure why people are so worried about developers getting trapped by locked down systems. I have plenty of other PC’s, running Linux, *BSD, Windows much less locked down. I’m very aware Apple is controlling of their platforms. No I’m not thrilled about certain aspects of the M1 platforms, but most platforms I’ve used feel locked down in some shape or form. If, in the case Apple tries some of the outlandish theories out there, I’ll simply cease to use it and probably trash Apple then as it will be useless to me, but I’m not locked into anything.

Homebrew is still a work in progress for Big Sur, let alone M1, and <i>brew upgrade</i> on an x86 Mac will give you this message:<p><pre><code> Warning: You are using macOS 11.0. We do not provide support for this released but not yet supported version. You will encounter build failures with some formulae. Please create pull requests instead of asking for help on Homebrew&#x27;s GitHub, Twitter or any other official channels. You are responsible for resolving any issues you experience while you are running this released but not yet supported version.</code></pre>

I am a iOS developer and I have an M1. There are some issues that need to be ironed out with some packages that I use not compiling for some reason on the arm iOS simulator, but that has diverted me to compiling on device which isn&#x27;t much of a hassle.<p>I am not bothered as much by the 16gb of ram, it is still rather usable. What I really bought the machine for was the battery life. I&#x27;ve had it for a day or two and it is amazing how long I can stay away from my power socket. Also this thing runs really cool. I have not even heard the fans spin up once, even during the recent Sydney heatwave (45°C).

I&#x27;ve been disappointed in Apple&#x27;s hardware offerings for developers over the past few years and almost swore them off, but have a renewed interest in this machine. However, it&#x27;s not because of anything Apple&#x27;s done in particular, but because I&#x27;m in the process of fully transitioning my workflow to the cloud, and using a laptop only as a thin client.<p>Of course, there will always be a need for running dev toolchains locally, but I wonder how many other people are like me who would rather use Linux over an internet connection, and really only need a terminal emulator and an IDE.

I travel and move around a lot (not so much now, but I still move around my country and to the office), so portability is very important to me. Another advantage of the MacBook line is that I can carry one Anker USB-C &amp; A charger and charge everything I have.<p>I was looking into buying the new MacBook Air. Anybody has any particular alternative to recommend? I am looking for a new laptop and haven&#x27;t found anything similar to the MacBook Air (I hate the touchbar) for a similar price (the 16GB of RAM model, if expandable better). Anything similar is either a lot more expensive or the build quality is a lot worse.<p>Any recommendation is more than welcomed!

Seems like a cool device. It’s too bad that apparently you need weird workarounds for more than one external monitor for the M1 MacBooks, which is my own personal dealbreaker.

I still can&#x27;t decide. I am wanting to get into ios development after 10 years. which computer should I go for.<p>What is opinion on these m1 machines longevity. Some tech people are comparing it to first gen iPad.Like they will be sunset after a couple of years vs 2nd gen which are supported much longer. but I am not so sure most of the issues with these first gen m1 machines are software so in theory they should be supported for long time.

I was confused why it’s hard to get a license for windows 10 on ARM. Doesn&#x27;t Windows 10 already support ARM?

I’m surprised at all the reviews talking about 16gb being enough, but with virtualization basically not excusing at this point I’m scratching my head.<p>My current computers feel like they have enough memory until I load virtual box, or VMware.

The performance of these is very impressive - selfishly, I&#x27;m glad to read that the 16&quot; is still faster for Xcode tasks (as I have the same spec as Pete and some of the commentary about the speed of the new models was making me a bit envious!), but I have no doubt the Pro models of these will be remarkably performant.<p>Personally I will try to wait it out until they release a new design... although may end up with a Mac Mini build machine

Sorry if this has already come up but apart from the excitement about performance what is the build quality like for the new MacBooks? The main issues I’ve been facing from Apple lately have been physical failures from keyboards to screens and ports. The 16” is better but already I’ve found some keyboard keys get unresponsive occasionally and reported battery health is deteriorating fast after only a handful of cycles...

Why is WindowServer using over 2 GB of RAM in the Activity Monitor screenshot? That seems absurdly high. Does it have a memory leak?

I thought a lot of stuff didn&#x27;t work with Homebrew? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Homebrew&#x2F;brew&#x2F;issues&#x2F;7857" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Homebrew&#x2F;brew&#x2F;issues&#x2F;7857</a><p>How do you run the command line tools through Rosetta once they are installed?

I’ve been on a new M1 since the day after release. Love it. FAR faster than my previous Mac. But there is some work left to do. It crashes every day, usually more than once. Frustrating but still very happy to have it. Just bought a second one today for my wife.

These first generations Apple Silicon Macs are really publicly available DTKs for developers.<p>I think Apple is expecting all developers to jump and port their apps so they are ready when the high-end Apple Silicon devices hit the market.

Are there CPU manuals from Apple that explain how to optimize assembly code for their CPU and document any deviations from the ARM reference architecture?

Was this a fully parallel build (using all cores)?

Ah, beta testing new M1 software

I guess Rosetta can’t handle anything that jits.<p>Edit: this is totally wrong. see thread.

What an odd article. It spends several paragraphs describing nightmarish compatibility issues and lack of support or capability for various mainstream tools, but seems to have a completely unjustified and wildly optimistic point of view that all the problems are just short term transitional annoyances that will be fixed in Q1 2021 or shortly thereafter. It concludes M1 is worth the hype.<p>What a bizarre perspective with nothing to support it except apparently blind optimism.

Dev here, the burden of Apple far exceeds any claimed time savings. I think every dev knows exactly what I&#x27;m talking about. And if you aren&#x27;t a dev, Apple treats us like replaceable Dogs.<p>Apple has killed any good will among nerdy developers by treating them like shit for 20 years. Sure there are still corporate developers that are forced to make iOS apps, but it&#x27;s not like a hobbyist is going to buy an Apple computer for embedded, web dev, gaming, PC applications, etc...<p>Until Apple treats us(and maybe their non dev customers) better, I don&#x27;t see any reason outside iOS Apps to ever buy a macbook for dev.

I&#x27;m starting to think that Steve Jobs was holding Apple back...

calm down, since 10 years cpu speed doesn&#x27;t really matter anymore, and if you aren&#x27;t involved in the apple ecosystem hulahoop (or javascripting - god forbid) i think m1 is not very interesting untill it allows other oses to run on free hardware.

All these developers are wasting time and money to help support a company that is actively working to lock down personal computers.<p>Think about the future where a new developer needs to pay a license fee, and have their software reviewed just to show his friends.

Interesting that Java &quot;write-once, run anywhere&quot; stuff ends up being the slowest due to having to run through emulation if it interfaced with native code (native compiled code: fast; java jit for the right arch: fast; java jit for the wrong arch due to old native integration: super slow).

Thinking of buying the mac air laptop, will my Python 2.6 and Django project run on this?

It saddens me to see devs locking themselves in Apple&#x27;s golden jail.

Most developers I know use already a mac. It is a faster system for similar hardware (maybe due to the filesystem or something) and its Unix insides support development work better than Windows.<p>M1 is just going to make macs even more dominant.<p>And AMD is not going to rescue Windows&#x2F;Intel. These night and day improvements are simply too big to be explained by TSMC being a better fab than Intel.

I don&#x27;t get this blog, neither what&#x27;s the point !?<p>The author lists several bugs, instead of posting the issue number with a link, he puts his Tweet with the bug numbers (without link). Im not sure what the author is trying to accomplish here. Also I guess these kind of bugs, although not nice, they are mostly because MacOS suffered the biggest change since its history and supporting 2 completely different architectures is not an easy job. Of course we are at the mercy of Apple to fix them but this is part of the deal when you buy such a machine at this point.<p>Then all other points are just showing all the known the same issues that some commercial SW was not yet ported to a new architecture.

Software is going to be a big sticking point for this platform and it may be more difficult outside of the professional software to bring along types of software.<p>Apple cedes a lot of sales by not attempting to bring into their fold all the gaming companies. Just looking at Steam alone shows the disparity and there is a lot of money to be had. The idea of just own two systems is one that not everyone can justify.

Maybe I&#x27;ve only focused on graphics and gaming PCs but it&#x27;s really interesting to see how low spec some of your work machines are in this thread, like maybe I should write more efficient code. My desktop is using 32gb of DDR4 ram and laptop is on 16gb. When I did controlmylights.net I was using almost all of the 32gbs, maxing out the gpu &#x2F;cpu. I don&#x27;t normally run that heavy of a production on my system but it was nice to be able to do it (2x resource heavy OBS stream setups (Twitch&#x2F;YouTube), MongoDB, Redis, NodeJS application, openFrameworks). My desktop raised the temperature of the room by at least 5 degrees F, it was a mini space heater. I definitely could have made that project in something lighter, maybe using Rust, but it&#x27;s nice to have the headroom. The next performance upgrade for me will be overclocking my 8700k.

Wow, HN is so much strict to Apple. I&#x27;m already seeing 4 ~ 5 top level comments on how Apple &quot;locks down&quot; computers and they are &quot;taking our freedom&quot;...<p>Apple have stated multiple times that they don&#x27;t have any intention to lock down macOS more or less - I can&#x27;t really think why anyone would think Apple would lock down macOS. There&#x27;s... really no reason right?<p>My gut feeling is that there are a lot of people that don&#x27;t like Apple, mostly due to their proprietary nature, and they just... argue against Apple. Before the M1 appeared, the argument was that Apple&#x27;s Macs are expensive for nothing, they have terrible hardware, Touch Bar is bad, software quality has declined, etc... and now it&#x27;s all about the user&#x27;s freedom.<p>Seriously people. This article is about using dev tools on the M1 Mac. Let&#x27;s not start arguing about how Apple is bad for freedom, etc.

I have a different perspective. I do all my development remotely if I can now in cloud VMs. I know that doesn’t apply to some classes of development but it’s a hell of a lot less painful isolating it and having snapshots available when inevitably you break something. The amount of hours I’ve lost due to an OS upgrade or dev tool chain upgrade breaking each other is huge so I keep them well apart.<p>Thus I’ve been using an 8gb M1 Mac mini doing this for a week now and haven’t had any problems. It makes a very nice terminal computer with luxury desktop. When a suitable 27” approx iMac appears with an M-series CPU in it, I will buy one. It’s nice being able to triple swipe between a Mac desktop with native apps, a desktop full of terminals to Linux VMs and a windows desktop machine via RDP transparently!