Ask HN: Teams with mixed dev machines – Intel and Apple Silicon | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Teams with mixed dev machines – Intel and Apple Silicon

2 pointsko3us3 comments

I head up an engineering team and im curious to know what others have experienced with having developers with mixed machines in their fleet.

My current team all have intel i7 based developer machines from 2015. They are working fine. However they are starting to show age.

Im employing some new employees soon, and was thinking of getting the Apple Silicon machines. However before I commit to that, wanted to know what challenges or issues I should be considering or being aware of when having a team that would essentially have two different architecture setups.

We do primarily web development and also do react native mobile apps.

We also have just migrated our core platform from .NET Framework to .NET Core.

We utilise docker too.

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I7 Mac's or PCs? I was recently issued an Apple Silicon Mac Pro as a secondary device. I personally find myself more productive on PCs or Linux machines, so you should take personal preference into account.

WSL provides a very good Linux environment on windows, so the Unix toolchain is no longer a reason to pic a Mac.

The biggest downside to developing on windows these days is abysmal git performance.

Mixing VS Studio for Mac and PC might be problematic, so you might want to factor in the purchase or Rider licenses for the whole team.

i7 Macbooks. Great thought points. Thank you!

I agree that the different VS Studio development on Apple Silicon vs Intel will probably be problematic. Mainly thinking build pipelines and package management.

Note - will refer to Apple Silicon as ARM below.

During the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon there have been issues related to the Dot Not libraries available and the availability of ARM images for Android emulators.

For example, MS Visual Studio will prompt you to remove your existing Intel Dot Net installation (that is supported by Rosetta) and have you install a native ARM version that does not seem to support the same libraries.

Also, to launch Xamarin Apps on Android I need to first open the emulator from Android Studio by running a simple project, then launching the intended App from Visual Studio.

I would suggest setting up fresh installs on both a new Intel and a new ARM computer, and then compare what issues you have. Also MS have just released a new version of Visual Studio for mac, so now might be a good time to see how your existing projects work with that.

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