Ask HN: For devs, any regrets on getting the M1 MacBook Air? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: For devs, any regrets on getting the M1 MacBook Air?

4 points__warlord__21 comments

That M2 Macbook Air looks spicy but I'm wondering if people have had any issues with the fanless M1 version as a developer?

I work on infrastructure and development work with my M1 Macbook Pro (python, go, terraform, ansible) and use the usual electron apps (slack, teams, vscode). So far, I haven't had any issues with performance, nor I have never heard the fans kick in.

Also, I only need one external monitor.

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Not good for heavy development work, super slow conpared to my workstation with a proper GPU, lots of things won’t work or is slow. Would suggest wait until things transition properly to apple silicon. For now, you can just use it for personal stuff.

What's heavy development work?

Right? Heavy development is so subjective he could mean anything from running `npm run start` on a react project all the way to training huge machine learning models.

Just recently bought my M1 MBA 8GB and absolutely love it. Use it primarily for AWS workloads and only read/consult AWS pdf docs locally. For what I am doing it’s great. Don’t even miss the 16Gb. Ofcourse YMMV if you think of running say Xcode. I have no issues thus far keeping a dozen chrome tabs open along with Vscode. For the price I paid(after I exchanged it for my 2018 MBA and educational discount) it’s a steal

M1 MBA was great. The downsides were that if something only works on intel or nvidia (Solana, simdjzon, CUDA) you can't run it, and 16GB is not enough RAM to run Google Chrome.

I've been happier with the M1 Max MBP which has enough RAM to run Google Chrome. For the upcoming M2, maybe 24GB of RAM will be enough to run Google Chrome. Hard to say.

How many tabs do you have open? I have absolutely zero problems running Chrome with 52 tabs and multiple other apps (and mostly electron based). Obviously this is not enough RAM to not use swap, but I don't experience any slowdown.

I'm not running my MBP 14" as hard as some other devs here, but it's been fantastic, and I've never encountered any slow down anywhere.

(Running intellij, pycharm, emacs, garageband, steam gaming)

The pang of FOMO now just after WWDC 2022 of seeing the M2 is understandable.

I had the same feeling.

But it's really just FOMO, if you can get by with your M1 mac (air or pro) there's no real need to run to the store and trade up.

There will always be an M3 or M4 by the time you're at a genuine upgrade cycle point.

As a portable computing solution, the biggest boon has been the battery life, lasting long enough to be truly portable without power outlet anxiety. This is absolutely a killer feature compared to other similar laptops.

I used my 2015 MBP until this year and plan to use the m1 MBP for another 5-7 years :)

My upgrade cycle was timed by the reappearance of the MagSafe charging port.

This said, I may get a MBA for travel.

I absolutely love the M1 Macbook Air. I was hesitant since I was moving from a dying 2014 MBP 15" and had worked on some of the intervening revisions to the MBP line, but I can say this is the first computer I've been excited about in a long time. I would likely opt for a bigger screen when it is time to upgrade, but otherwise it is my ideal laptop.

I use VSCode for go/C# and have 0 issues thus far, including debugging in go which was a concern for me.

DevOps engineer here, I don't have any hardware/performance issues with my M1 Air.

I've encountered issues with older terraform dependencies that pre-date Apple Silicon that I've needed to update for some client work. Similarly, I've also had some issues with older node.js versions and dependencies.

most the tools i need do not run on m1 and crash on rosetta so after some months i gave up after being fleeced

I've been writing elixir, python, go, doing kubernetes stuff without any issues, it's fantastic (unless you're using VSCode). The only thing I'd change is to have a screen without a bezel. Oh and a good tiling wm for mac, but that's besides the point.

I got the 8 GB version mostly intending to use it as an email device, but it soon became my main work computer because it’s so great.

I need to use VMs for development, so unfortunately it hasn’t been a good developer device. But I bet if I had more RAM it would be awesome!

I only regret buying M1Pro because even M1 Air would be more than enough for my web-dev tasks.

I've got an i9 MBP for my work machine.

No issues with my M1 MBA for my personal machine. Admittedly it doesn't get used for heavy weight development, but I've had no issues with e.g. IntelliJ. It feels as quick as my i9 if not quicker for most things.

I got the M1 Air before but then replaced it with an 14" Pro.

If I still got the M1 Air, I still wouldn't regret it. It was a fantastic fanless machine. I would have had it for 18 months, long enough to expect some upgrades.

Same, the air was a great machine and probably would have been fine, but work was willing to upgrade my machine to the pro and hand down my air to the new non-dev hire.

Nope, no regrets.

I love my M1 MacBook Pro 16". It does everything I need. There will always be better and faster machines as time goes by. Eventually I will upgrade, but I don't need to do it every year.

The only regret after buying M! MBA is that year later Apple released MacBookPro version :( besides that - for my needs (web development, novel writing, running small business) it's fantastic.

You're not missing anything and you don't have this crappy Touch Bar instead of useful function keys. Count yourself lucky.

Not used the mba as extensively add others, but, I find it sufficient for my needs. Though it doesn't like my earpods much...

Webstorm and Android studio work fine.

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