I don't use VSCode but most of my team do and I frequently pair with them. Never noticed it to be anything other than very snappy. They all have M1s or up (I am the author of this post, so the detail about their hardware is in the link).
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
I shy away from x86 images too, even thought I use docker.
Some challenges included Docker images being arch specific, old Terraform modules lacking ARM support (forcing an upgrade we'd otherwise defer), and reduction in tooling we'd consider for production. We generally worry about arch specific bugs, although I don't believe we've seen any (other than complete failure to run certain tools).
It's a bummer because one of them is also a 2018 fully loaded and I would have a hard time even selling it to someone because of how much better the M2/M3 is. It's wild when I see people building hackintoshes on like a Thinkpad T480 ... its like riding a pennyfarthing bicycle versus a ducati.
My M2 Air is my favorite laptop of all time. Keyboard is finally back to being epic (esp compared to 2018 era, which I had to replace myself and that was NOT fun). It has no fan so it never makes noise. I rarely plug it in for AC power. I can hack almost all day on it (using remote SSH vscode to my beefy workstation) without plugging in. The other night I worked for 4 hours straight refactoring a ton of vue components and it went from 100% battery to 91% battery.
I would rather have a ton of beefy compute that is remotely accessible and one single lightweight super portable laptop, personally.
I should probably donate these mac laptops to someone who is less fortunate. I would love to do that, actually.
Indeed. I keep around a 2015 MBP with 16GB (asked my old job's IT if I could just keep it when I left since it had already been replaced and wouldn't ever be redeployed) to supplement my Mac Mini which is my personal main computer. I sometimes use screen sharing, but mostly when I use the 2015 it's just a web browsing task. With adblocking enabled, it's 100% up to the task even with a bunch of tabs.
Given probably 80% of people probably use webapps for nearly everything, there's a huge amount of life left in a late-stage Intel Mac for people who will never engage in the types of tasks I used to find sluggish on my 2015 (very large Excel sheet calculations and various kinds of frontend code transpilation). Heck, even that stuff ran amazingly better on my 16" 2019 Intel MBP, so I'd assume for web browsing your old Macs will be amazing for someone in need, assuming they don't have bad keyboards.
My 2015 Retina is running Arch linux as an experiment. That was kinda fun. I used it as a main dev rig for a few weeks years ago when the 2018 battery finally kicked the bucket.
One thing that I could do with your rig though would be to start benchmarks to check for performance regressions, and then just put my laptop in my backpack.
I’ve replayed this pattern with other targets, too. For instance a system I maintain relies on a whitelisted IP in our VPC to interact with certain API’s at a vendor. I could proxy to that node and use that IP, but I’ve found it much easier to hack on that project (running on a dedicated EC2 node) by just vscode attaching there, using it live, and committing the changes from the end server running the system.
Being able to kill my laptop and know everything is still running remotely is nice. I rely on tmux heavily.
Have a NAS to sync data files as needed.
I'd happily fix that for you if you want. I'd even pay shipping to take it off your hands. Anything would be an upgrade for my mom's old toshiba laptop ;) email in profile
Not every day one sees a user report a 5x performance issue that seems so simple to reproduce.
I suspect one of the reasons why Apple silicon looks so good is the previous generations were at a dip of performance. Maybe they took the foot off the gas WRT updates as they knew the M series of chips was coming soon?
I do regularly try VSCode to see what I’m missing.
VS Code has great remote editing that I do use.
However, on my M1 Pro 16”, VS Code is noticeable laggier than sublime Text!
Just clicking on a file in the side bar and waiting for text to appear has lag. Many non-nerdy people might think it’s instant, but I can see the lag clearly! LOL
For my tastes the VS Code UI is cluttered and generally feels slow. The extensions are great but also a nightmare of updates and alerts of things broken.
If it’s your thing, you can use CoPilot in Sublime Text through a plugin that actually works really well!
I’m on the fence about CoPilots benefits though.
Sometimes I’ll flick over to VS Code to use the chat copilot if I need an answer for an API call etc….
If I had to stick with one, I’m sticking with Sublime Text.
On my M2 Max, all of that is ~fully resolved. There is still some slight lag, and I have to figure it’s just the Electron tax, but never enough to really bother me, certainly not enough to defer restarting anything. And I can count the times I’ve even heard the fans on one hand… and even so, never for more than a few seconds (though each time has been a little alarming, just because it’s now so rare).
I'm a professional and I make a living writing software. Investing ~4k every 3-4 years on fast computer is a no brainer to me.
I couldn't believe it.
Absolutely get an apple silicon machine, no contest the best hardware on the market right now.