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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

In the big developer markets, the price of the device isn't a huge factor. Today, the available stock is a bigger deal. At least for a daily driver.

I also want the highest resolution screen with crispest graphics possible if I'm staring at it all day (1080p IPS displays are awful for my eyes). The thing about Macs that makes them nicer than most comparable Linux machines is the display is much better.

One of the only reasons to consider the Mac over something like an XPS today though (other than that you can go out and buy it) is that it supports Adobe products which you may need for front end work. However, if my company is all in on Figma and Im just working on a generic backend you bet your butt I'm asking for an XPS.

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> In the big developer markets, the price of the device isn't a huge factor.

You might suffer from SV syndrome. I live in a small town in the east of France: anything Apple is unaffordable (without major sacrifices and uncertainty to be able to replace the machine if it breaks too soon).

Right now if I had to replace my current computer, I would have about 600€ total budget. And France isn't exactly a third world country (but we're doing our best to get there ;)

I'm not in SV, but my employers have all provided my machines. Some companies are better than others, but price usually isn't a factor at places I've worked. I also probably wouldn't work at a company that gives their engineers shitty computers, since that's like working at a restaurant that makes their cooks use dull knives (and there is a big market of places that will give you whatever set you want)

I'm also in France, but in a larger city, but what you said still rings true. I prefer older Thinkpads, as if something breaks I can either fix it myself or take it to just about any computer repair shop on earth and they'll have the ability to repair it. Plus they tend to run Debian with ease.

1920x1200 is good enough for me, i don't use anything adobe, don't do graphics, etc

have you looked at cpu performance or cpu-only power efficiency of the XPS 17 vs M1 Pro MacBook 16 for backend work ?

The last I heard, docker was around 2x slower than Intel macs and that performance was already pretty bad.

I don't really care about power efficiency tbh, I'm plugged into the wall all day

I don't know where you heard that, but even if we accept that assertion, it's not relevant to this conversation.

We're talking about running Linux on the Mac, so you won't be paying that virtualisation penalty.

There is no reason to think ARM64 containers running on an ARM64 machine would run any worse than AMD64 images running on an AMD64 machine. So given M1 Pro/Max Macs consistently rate amongst the best performing laptops on the market, you should expect a similar experience when running ARM64 containers on Linux.

As more developers pick up ARM64 macs, more binaries and containers will be releasing in ARM64. There was already a massive boost in this kind of thing after the launch of the M1.

I want to run the same containers I deploy though, we deploy native code, and right now we are not deploying on ARM.

So paying the price of Docker x86 images chomping CPU and being significantly slower is a downgrade from Intel.

Then maybe an ARM platform isn't the right choice for you.

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