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Comment by whynotminot | Hacker News Reader

What dev shop gives their engineers base model machines?

Doesn't need to be a dev shop. Go into any standard office and most productivity office workers will be running dual monitors now.

But with the general power of the base model Apple Silicon I don't think most dev shops really need the higher end models, honestly.

Where are you getting that impression from the parent post? Maybe they were on a 2, 3, or 4 year upgrade cycle and still had a bunch of Intel MBPs when Apple Silicon hit the market. That'd be extremely typical.

What dev shop immediately buys all developers the newest and shiniest thing as soon as its released without trialing it first?

Yeah, they were running Intel Macbook Pros because that's what everyone was used to, and also because production ran on x86_64 architecture.

At least at the time, things worked a bit easier having the entire pipeline (dev -> prod) use a single architecture.

Yeah, that was my experience. The early M1 adopters at my previous company definitely ran into some growing pains with package availability, etc.

(Overall the transition was super smooth, but it wasn't instant or without bumps)

We stuck with Intel MBPs for awhile because people needed machines, but the scientific computing infrastructure for Apple silicon took more than a little bit to get going.

Huh? He was talking about dual monitor situations being a problem.

If the company bought Pro or Max chips and not base models, it wouldn’t be a problem.

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