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Comment by mattfrommars | Hacker News Reader

I am in the market for a new laptop and bit skeptic for M1 Chips. Could anyone please tell me how is this not a "premium high performance Chromebook" ?

Why should I buy this and not Dell XPS machine if I will be using it for web development/Android Development/C#/DevOps. Might soon mess with machine learning

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Better battery life while performing faster than any Intel/AMD chip at equivalent power usage. Portability is the reason for the existence of laptops.

For web dev it works very well, android development no clue, c# is primarily a windows-oriented development environment so probably not so great. For devops, well.. Mac is a linux-esque environment, it'll be fine?

I have the m1 air and the big advantages are the absurd battery life and the extremely consistent very high performance.

It's always cold, it's always charged, it's always fast.

I believe you can get both faster cpu and gpu performance on a laptop, but it costs a lot in battery life and heat which has a bigger impact on usability than I believed before getting this one.

Might want to add, this is my first ever apple laptop. I've always used Lenovo laptops, ran mostly windows/linux dual boots on my laptops and desktops over the years.

> c# is primarily a windows-oriented development environment so probably not so great.

I'm not confident that is still true today. .net core is multi-platform all-the-way and is the future.

That's a debate between OSX and alternatives, the M1 has little to do with that. Except maybe the Rosetta for unsupported x86, but I doubt that'll cause you any issues.

Edit: C# support is there on OSX, Rider has Apple Silicon builds and .net core is cross platform now.

ML is probably a let down and you'll be stuck to CPU sized workloads, that being said the M1 does pretty well compared to other x86 CPU

Why is ML a let down?

I am a very satisfied Apple customer, but will gladly tell you that a Windows machine would make more sense for the use cases you’ve described.

C# is the only odd item there. Entire companies are doing everything else in that list using exclusively MacBook Pros.

Isn't C# quite available on mac?

Yes and dotnet 6 (release date scheduled for 11/9, but is available now as rc2) works natively on the m1... REALLY quickly I might add :)...

I go between vs.code and JetBrains Rider (rider now has an EAP that runs natively on the m1)...

I am going to upgrade just because I didn't get enough ram the first time around :)

Other than the ML work maybe. The Apple chips claim to be very performant with ML workloads.

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