Hoping I can pick one up soon. I figure the Pro is probably the right move for a developer workload, although I do like the size of the Air.
I recently built a 12th-gen Intel workstation for my main dev machine, because x86 is still the path of least resistance for the type of work I do. It's got a ton more cores, a higher memory ceiling, and faster storage than the MacBook. I'd choose this over a Mac Studio, too; because I built it for a third of the price. I love my Macs, but I'm enjoying linux (again, for the type of work I do). Different strokes, etc.
And I felt (perhaps incorrectly) that you get more horsepower for your buck with AMD.
Of course, M1 is pretty cool too.
However on desktop where power usage isn't an issue, Intel 12th gen performance has pulled ahead of AMD. Theoretically even on laptops too but I suspect they have the common problem of powerful Intel cpus in laptops where they cooling just can't hack it and they throttle to make it worthless getting top end Intel. So I believe AMD is still better on laptops presently.
… right now I say to wait until the end of 2022 for a build. Let Zen 4 and Raptor Lake come out. Then realize Zen 5 and Comet Lake are likely another very real step above that the following year, though at least you’ll be able to take your new PSU, memory and GPU along with.
Never mind the reality that Apple is just getting started.
Granted, you can’t wait forever. I did a build last year, and now get to see how things shake out as all the new stuff comes available over the next few years.
Also, the AM4 socket is at the end of its life. Intel’s LGA 1700 is expected to be used for two more CPU generations, so there’s an upgrade path.
Do you have any sources? I was unable to find any info on Meteor Lake and board compatibility.
That said, AM4 is a dead end socket, so building right now is a coin toss between the 12900k and the 5950x as far as price and performance. I'm not sure the 13900k is going to be much of an upgrade.
I just bought a 12400 mostly because it was 15% cheaper than the 5600x and it comes with an iGPU. You're right that it's unclear whether 13th or 14th gen will be an upgrade or possible, respectively.
Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster.
It’s almost as fast as a modern AMD/Intel desktop, which is really amazing in a laptop form factor. But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.
Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.
You make it sound like the reviewers mindlessly regurgitate Apple’s material. Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s have numbers very close to Apple’s figures.
Now, you get diminishing returns in a lot of daily tasks so perceived performance is not proportional to benchmark scores (a 2x speedup when you open an application is not very meaningful when it took 0.5s anyway). But it does not mean that the reviews were inaccurate.
> But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.
More like leapfrogging. Which is fine, AMD and Intel are doing it all the time and the world is not ending for either company.
The narrative is that it is faster than anything else at equivalent power consumption. Sure, you can get overclocked i9s that are faster, but not in a laptop with a ~1 day battery life.
> Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.
We’ll see. As usual, the truth will be in the numbers.
It’s not completely absurd that something larger than a 3090 with vastly better memory bandwidth could be competitive. The M1 is going to be worse at things like ray tracing, most probably, but the 3090 itself is not more magic than M1s.
This. They wrote that M1 takes second place after Ryzen, while needing way less power.
I don't know. The M1 Macs (we have two of them now) accomplish what Intel/AMD spent 2013+ trying and largely failing to do - maximizing battery life without compromising on performance. The suckers are fast. They're not the fastest kits of hardware out there, but they're certainly within shooting distance.
They do this without having a bulky chassis, multiple fans running constantly, or needing to be tethered to a power chord. They've been available for close to a year and a half now(?) and, unless if I've missed something, Intel/AMD still don't have a viable competitor.
Now, I completely agree that the software environment still hasn't completely caught up. But for my use case that's ok - give me a working shell terminal, web browser, and word processor, and I'm happy. I'm also lucky enough that I have a very well equipped remote system that I can push my actual work to. If I had to use my laptop for development, it may very well be a different story, but that's the trade off you make for being an early adopter.
Interesting. What is that you dev?
I'm not an apple developer at all, but my dev experience with both Java and Go has been pretty frictionless.
My Air is my secondary machine, but that's only really because my workstation is a 16 core/64GB AMD machine and does our product build and test run in about half the time the Air does, which itself is half or less the time previous laptops did. But in the few months that this machine was in transit, the Air did a great job.
I'll chime in here. I have the same experience (Julia, R, JS, and a little bit of C/Python). I have an M1 laptop that I use constantly, but I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity to remote into my working environment.
If I had to use my M1 laptop has my main development machine, I would think very hard about trying to pick up a T14 or something similar.
Early on there was docker weirdness for some of my work, but after a few components got updated it’s been great, better than any x86 laptop I’ve used.
It's gotten much better over the last year, but I still run into enough problems that I try to keep all of my actual development work on a remote machine.
Same. Java, Go, and web dev is my every day. Not an exactly fair comparison, but my first M1 MBA replaced a 2017 MBP, and it cut my java test suit times in half. 16GB wasn't quite enough RAM for all I do so now I'm a 64gb MBP M1.
I've thought about building a Ryzen desktop and just running linux, but I don't want to split between two machines and need to be mobile.
Same. Can't wait for Asahi Linux to be upstreamed, it'd be a great combination of price/performance/battery life/usability.
EDIT: small edge to AMD for graphics cards, but both are fine if using a distribution like Ubuntu
It’s an i9-12900k on a Z690 motherboard (tons of these, I got a gigabyte model). I got a terabyte of nice NVME and 64GB of memory; made it out the door for about $1600 with a case, taxes, and everything. I didn’t buy a graphics card because I don’t need to drive anything other than some text editors and browser windows, and it’s really not a buyers market right now. I’ll probably pick up something in a year or so.
If you’ve never built a computer, highly recommend! It’s really not difficult, though can take time and it can be frustrating. Really rewarding when you boot it for the first time, though.
For best compatibility (and lots of other reasons) I recommend Fedora - it usually has a much more up to date kernel than most other distros.
I moved 100% of my python web development to my M1 Max. Everything is running native. Zero downside. I run Debian ARM in Parallels VMs for my test suite, and deploy to both Graviton and Intel AWS instances.
For my workload (music production), and despite still having to run Ableton through Rosetta, it can handle roughly twice as many tracks as my 2018 MBP (which luckily is _not_ something I purchased). All my previous "problem" projects now run perfectly. And this is all while running completely silently and barely getting warm compared to my 2018 MBP, which runs fans full blast and gets super hot if I so much as glance at Ableton. Can't say I miss the hiss of the fan when I'm trying to mix tracks.
If the developers of plugins I use all the time ever get their ducks in a row and finally get around to updating them to support native ARM (that's the current limiting factor), I imagine it will be even better.
Kind of embarrassing that it's taking some devs so long.. Steve Duda managed to get Serum updated within a couple months of the original M1 release.
BTW, if you have a license for Live 11, version 11.1 forward has a Universal build, so it can run natively on M1 Macs rather than through Rosetta. [0]
[0] https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001261150-Mac-...
FL Studio also has a build for ARM, but it runs each non-ARM plugin in a wrapper which somehow uses an entire CPU core. After loading more than a couple of plugins I see something that is otherwise unheard of on my M1 Macbook - 1000% CPU usage and fans at full speed.
So I stick to running the app via Rosetta - higher-than-average CPU usage in general, but it means my plugins behave.
I guess the risk of data loss is acceptable .
Is it? Steve Duda has no choice, his lunch is getten eaten by Matt Tytel and the folks at Native Instruments. If he wants to keep selling his $150+ plugin, he better stay on the cutting edge.
For everyone else though, I find it hard to blame them. Overnight you get a complete architecture change that you need to buy test hardware for, test-compile for ARM, find out what breaks, source new ARM-compatible libraries for what dod break, re-write some/all of your codebase to account for these changes, profile the performance difference, re-evaluate if the native version is worth it, then set up a testing and CI pipeline for a second architecture. Since most of these plugins are written with the notoriously fragile JUCE framework in C++, I can see why it's not just an overnight task to get it working on Apple Silicon unless you drop everything and make it your top priority.
My point is that companies like Native Instruments have vastly more resources and developers than one individual developer, and still very few of their supposedly flagship products are M1 compatible. It's been a year and a half, and Massive X still isn't updated. You'd think they would toss at least one developer at it. I guess that maybe points to organizational rot more than anything (I guess Massive X generally being an outdated flop is also evidence of this), but the point stands.
Except it didn’t happen overnight, Apple announced it 6 months in advance. There has been affordable hardware available for porting since june 2020, almost 2 years ago. If a developer hasn’t gotten around to it by now, I doubt it is a priority for them, let alone their top priority.
Native Instruments straight up told me on facebook that they will not even test their plugins on any betas when they're available.
This is seriously overstating things.
Steve has spent years continuously optimizing his code base. It was already clean and relatively free of cruft compared to code bases of similar age.
If you are developing on something like JUCE and don't have an extensive amount of optimized assembly or AVX instructions to deal with, yeah, porting is fast. Likewise if your suite uses a common framework (ala MeldaProduction, FabFilter, uHe, etc.).
NI's code base is not clean, and they have the organizational problem of developers coming, developing a product, and then leaving, orphaning the code base. Brian Clevinger is doing his own thing now with Rhizomatic, so good luck every seeing Absynth native. But NI has maintained active development of Kontakt because it is their cash cow, and thus their first native release. But Reaktor? Massive? Massive X? Nowhere in sight.
Further, like many developers, they have the added problem of VST3, which is a royal PITA to get right. Since Steinberg is trying to pull the rug out from all native VST2 development on M1, many larger developers like NI don't want to risk the potential lawsuits. They also have no choice but to push out native VST3s, since Cubase 12 does not support native VST2s.
So there are a lot of economic and technical pressures at work that you have to take into account.
The fact remains though that a loooot of producers use Macbook Pros, and I'm assuming many will be upgrading to M1s within the next couple years. I'm genuinely curious when the pressures will actually force these large organizations to take the transition seriously.
VST2 used to be the standard development and testing target, which was then wrapped to other formats. But all of the developer workflows built around it are now at risk because of Steinberg's asshattery. I know for a fact that this has delayed a number of plugin releases, as developers have to put time into refactoring their code around a new standard target. Thank God for u-He and Bitwig leading the way here. I've tested the Surge XT CLAP build in Bitwig and it just works.
It is much better than it was not so long ago due to actually working at all, and it appears there is much more room for optimization, so the comparison is not over yet. But as of right now, it isn't that great.
I've seen some very serious savings after switching Java workloads to ARM.
TBH it's surprising that it's only 'quite a bit far behind'.
Compare Intel vs M1 Macs with x86 vs ARM containers, and you will be blown away with the performance increase.
That is a strange way to put it. Rosetta 2 (and orig.) is not virtualization, it is emulation, though there is a half-decent argument that Rosetta 2 (and orig.) is not emulation either -- it is recompilation.
If you run an x64 Mac binary on the host, Rosetta (simplified) translates the code to arm64 then runs it. If you run a Linux VM and execute an x64 Linux binary or container inside it, Rosetta can’t help you. You’ll be running inside a big emulator - in fact, Docker Desktop uses QEMU under the hood I think.
But it's not as if you can't run a virtual machine native to the platform. Qemu works on M1, Parallels works on M1 (ARM VM only) and there is a preview for VMWare's Hypervisor that will run even Windows 11 on the M1, but the VM software is native code (but not necessarily the system in the VM), so Rosetta isn't used.
In one of our projects the benchmarks look like this to run our test suite for a web app using volume mounts:
- 2020 Intel MBP (10th gen CPU, 32GB of memory, SSD): 37 seconds
- First generation M1 MBP: 31 seconds
- WSL 2: 3 seconds
The WSL 2 box is an old workstation I have from 6-7 years ago with an i5 3.2ghz CPU, 16gb of RAM and one of the first SSDs. All in all it was about $800.
The WSL 2 box is so fast for Docker because the volume performance is pretty much as good as native Linux. It's really fast.
The performance of this will be terrible; there is likely little room for optimisation and you should not expect this to get any faster in the future.
Using aarch64 containers changes the game entirely. Common base images like Ubuntu are already multiarch so will just work out of the box. But this has obvious downsides and won’t be a suitable solution for everyone.
I picked up an M1 Pro last week and it really has lived up to expectations. It’s silent no matter what I throw at it, far faster, and after 5 hours of use I still have 76% remaining.
The new MBP is as game-changing as everyone claims.
That's what i expected too. I was really disappointed that after a two hour Teams call(browser) the battery was at 50%. I know Teams is a dumpster fire, but still, my multi year old Ubuntu XPS 13 did better than this.
I did look at Windows alternatives at the time but ultimately decided that I wanted to remain on Mac.
Long story short, I ended up buying the smallest Air available with no upgrades, and I’m so happy that I did. Unless you’re doing some serious heavy lifting it’ll be fine, and at it’s small price point it’s not something I worry about breaking. That last part may be an ADHD thing, but it does add to the experience of using a laptop around the house where you also have a car and a 3 year old.
I was on the fence about the 8gb ram, but it frankly out performs my work t14s thinkpad which has 32gb for any sort of programming I do on it.
The only real downside is the lack of the MagSafe charger, but it holds power so well that it’s rarely in the charger when I’m using it. So my advice would be to get the smallest air, unless you know why you’re getting something more powerful.
If/when MacBook Air gets the M2 redesign (hopefully with the super nice screen), that will be the no brainer purchase of the decade.
What I'd absolutely buy is a 16" MacBook Air, like an Apple version of the LG Gram.
Edit: For comparison, the 16" LG Gram with a discrete Nvidia GPU is exactly as light as the 13" M1 MacBook Air, and supposedly it has great battery life. And all those ports...sigh...
I got a 2019 MBP and my 3 year old spilled water on it. The repair cost more than an M1 Air. My next computer will be a cheap air I think. I won't feel bad upgrading early or if something happens to it.
Or you want a large screen, or IO, or more than one external display, …
There’s a billion reasons to want/need the pro (unlike the max).
With the level of performance on the M1, I'll take the battery life and less weight on the Air over more cores. I hope the next gen base chip (M2?) will have more display output and more RAM, and the MBAir line up will have a 15/16" size (with the Pro speakers).
The Air is silent, it's powerful enough for fairly serious dev workloads, it has a battery that lasts longer than I've ever seen before and it can run multiple displays if you get a compatible displaylink dock.
If you like it, there's little reason not to get one AFAICT. Make sure to grab the 16GB of RAM though!
Its the first 'laptop' that I can comfortably have on my lap for hours on end
According to MacRumors update guide Air should be updated very soon, so I’m personally waiting for the updated version.
This pushed me to the 14” MBP with 16GB and 1TB. You can literally get it swapped out same day at apple stores if anything goes wonky.
The only reason I returned my Air and waited for the MacBook Pro I'm typing on now is I made the mistake of loading some games on the Air - and one game I love suffers due to my mod addiction and can really use more RAM.
And that's something that many people don't seem to realize - if you buy from Apple directly they have a two week no questions asked return policy. Obviously the machine has to work and you need to return all the parts, but if you aren't sure you could always get an Air and you have two weeks to make up your mind if it's sufficient or not.
Man, it was SO hard taking it back and waiting 9 months before the MacBook Pro's came out. So be careful - once you taste and M1 Mac it's almost impossible to go back to anything else :) At least if you decide the Air isn't for you after all you'll only have to wait at max a few weeks.
The pro, though very fast, can also hang when leaving too many apps open. But I did leave way too much running. It feels blazingly fast.
You should really think about that workloads you will use in the day to day. And also consider if you’re docking it. If you are, the pro is a much safer bet and the screen brightness and size is less relevant.
So the tldr is that the 64Gb of ram is the big differentiation. The other is plugging monitors into the pro.
I'm also doing FE workloads, 8GB is nearly there but the swap is still fast. I still have some swap usage on the 16GB but mostly because of Chrome tabs rather than workloads.