Comment by nesk_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nesk_ | Hacker News Reader

You can go for a Macbook Air without any issues, everything will work the same between the Air and the Pro (and iMac, and Mac Mini, etc.) since they all operate under the same operating system, macOS.

As a personal advice, you can go with a M1 or M2, depending on your budget, either are really fast processors. However, the standard 8 GiB of RAM really bothers me and I hate the fact Apple still sells some computers with so little memory. I you plan to use this computer ONLY for testing your Electron app, you can go with the basic 8 GiB of RAM, but I REALLY recommend you to upgrade to 16 GiB.

Also, if you're on a budget, check out Apple's refurb or Backmarket, but go with a M1/M2 processor anyway, there is no point to use a Intel chip today.

For testing it might even be beneficial to use an underspec'ed device.

Great - thanks very much.

8 GB on an M1 or M2 is not the same as 8 GB on an Intel-based device; the memory bandwidth is significantly higher. A 2x factor (Apple Silicon 8/16 GB vs Intel 16/32) seems about right.

The RAM that is available is faster and the SSD is also quite fast, but it's a little bit misleading to claim that an Apple Silicon Mac with 8 GB of RAM performs similar to an Intel Mac with 16 GB RAM. The Intel Mac will actually almost always perform worse and run hotter with CPU-heavy (but not memory-constrained) tasks, no matter the amount of RAM it has. But if the Apple Silicon Mac has to read / write constantly to and from swap and the Intel Mac doesn't (assuming whatever you do doesn't require an Intel Mac with 16 GB of RAM to swap), you will still notice a difference.

Overall I would still prefer an Apple Silicon Mac especially if it's just for testing purposes. It's not like one Electron app will require constant swapping. An M1 Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM is perfectly fine for that.

Under many circumstances, even most, this is generally true-ish. However, experimenting with Stable Diffusion in recent weeks has shown me that when you need to load something in memory that's greater than 8GB, only physical memory greater than 8GB will do!

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