Ask HN: Is MacBook Pro 14 M1 16/512 still a great choice for development? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is MacBook Pro 14 M1 16/512 still a great choice for development?

3 pointsdondraper366 comments

I have been using my kind of old Dell Inspiron for about 5 years. It has 16GB of RAM but the keyboard has been incredibly buggy recently.

In my country, it's not that easy at all to buy a laptop without paying 2x price but there is one seemingly good option with MBP 14 M1 with 16GB of RAM and 512 SSD. The price is around $1700 which is not much higher than in the US.

There is also the newer Macbook Air M2 16/512, but the price label bites at $1900.

Based on what I have read so far, the MBP is a decent choice: the screen is gorgeous, as well as the performance. The price difference makes it a no brainer, what do you think?

I am a backend developer with no crazy performance requirements. The good old combination of an IntelliJ IDE, containers, K8s, plenty of browser tabs.

Would you pay more for the M2-based Air?

In general, what caveats should I keep in mind when buying a Macbook? I have been a Windows and then Linux user all my life so I have little no idea as to what could go wrong.

With some pieces of equipment there are rules of thumb like "don't forget to check X", "don't buy if Y doesn't equal Z"? Is there anything like that here?

Thanks!

That's a great computer for development. I have the 16" version, but otherwise the same. It's fantastic, unless you need to do ML stuff, in which case you might want a PC with an Nvidia GPU.

Actually they are pretty good if you stick to repos with MPS support (or try to hack it in yourself). They have larger memory pool than the small AMD/Nvidia GPUs that ship with most 14" laptops, and are "fast enough" on the GPU or NPU.

AMD 7000 series laptops might be similar... some day. But there's basically zero support for their NPU now.

Is the Asus G14 in your country? They are suspiciously cheap in the US ($1100 sometimes), have solid specs, and have a GPU for ML stuff (like running LLMs locally for free).

Otherwise, a M-chip MBP is good for the same reason. Just try to get one with more than 16GB of RAM if you can, as that is kinda tight in the long run.

In case you need to run x86 containers: Docker now has Rosetta support - but it's buggy.

https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/384

Without Rosetta it uses relatively slow Qemu emulation.

I use Docker Compose and spin up multiple containerized microservices locally. How slow can it be? It would be sad to buy quite an expensive laptop and downgrade development experience although in just one aspect :)

Not exactly sure - haven't been able to test myself. I'm holding off on upgrading from an Intel Mac to an M2 until that bug is closed.

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