Asking them whether a laptop’s hardware is good is like asking a power lifter whether a gym has good equipment.
All our devs need than my current music making setup, and I am thinking of going to 128Gb because I do dev work around video.
Very good analogy.
This is all anyone should care about, but I digress...
The reason you care about those features isn’t because you’re a programmer specifically, it’s because you happen to have a personal preference for those things.
- Why should a programmer care about the display really at all? Text can easily be displayed with very high contrast. Matte or glossy shouldn’t matter very much.
- Why would a programmer ever need more RAM than an Adobe Creative Suite or Blender user? I do all my programming on a system with 8GB of RAM and my biggest memory bottleneck is Chrome.
- What would a programmer need a lot of storage for? Text?
- Everyone needs long battery life, and the M1 is industry-leading in that regard for basically all tasks. Why does a programmer need to remove the battery if it lasts beyond a full work day?
- Self-service repair is important for people who know how to do that. While I agree that computers should be built with repairability in mind, and that Apple scores poorly in that regard, programming itself is a software skill, not hardware. You don’t have to know how to repair or build a computer to be a programmer, and if you don’t know how to do it then your ability to do your own repair is less important. I.e., if you have to pay someone a labor cost make upgrades and repairs, you might not prioritize that aspect of the system.
One of the best programmer laptops on the market is the MacBook Air. You can regularly buy it for under $1000, the battery goes for 12+ hours real world usage, it has no fan and stays cool, it’s got a great keyboard and trackpad, it’s faster than laptops that cost hundreds more, and it’s very light and portable with a small power brick.
Depends on your workload, compiling a large program can chew a lot of RAM.
I also have a M1 Macbook Air, and it’s s great laptop but far from the best programmers laptop for all use cases.
Replicating prod environments with lots of data means large VM's in my case.
Seriously good screens are lovely.
Different needs for different devs but I for one am very happy with maxed out machines, and have no qualms in upgrading :)
Yes you'd need the 16gb ram build but you wouldn't really need a 32gb one.
I wish it really did work that way or I'd still have an M1 MacBook Air - but it doesn't. If you really need RAM there is no substitute for having the proper amount of RAM.
And don't even bother with the "but it swaps fast" argument with machines that have SSD chips *soldered onto the motherboard*.
Just get the amount of RAM you need up front!
I'm comparing non-macos operating systems to macos.
I'm not comparing m1 vs intel, though the M1 brought some improvement in this regard, most of the ram magic was already in place since around MacOS Leopard I think?
> I wish it really did work that way or I'd still have an M1 MacBook Air - but it doesn't. If you really need RAM there is no substitute for having the proper amount of RAM.
That's like saying "calories in calories out" and then only eating vegetable oil for maximum savings on food.
If you need to load a 20gb file into memory, yes you'll need the 20gb of physical ram, but for /multitasking/ 8gb in MacOS really is equivalent to near 16gb in Windows.