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Comment by mpalmer | Hacker News Reader

M1 is still fast, the speed of its successors does not change that.

I use one for software development and it's great. Sometimes rust builds are slow and I'd love to force that to be faster with hardware (optimizing build time would be a huge undertaking with not-so-great returns), otherwise I'm totally content. I also have an M2 Max with 32GB of RAM that still feels like magic. I've never had computers that felt so fast for so long.

I dunno, working with M1 daily I struggle with resource contention and slow py/js builds. I'd love something faster when work provides me with updated device.

Sounds like you need to spend some time optimising your build. Faster hardware just makes developers lazy. I'm still on an M1 and it's fine, although I do have 32GB.

To be fair, for all you know they’re building something pretty crazy that justifies high resource consumption.

Faster hardware doesn’t exclusively make developers lazy, it also opens up capability.

That's the thing. It's not a trivial project. I've already put a lot of time into optimizations and the returns are diminishing now.

In the age of AI it seems wild to blame developers for being “lazy” and needing more resources.

Like, if I were buying a new workstation right now, I’d want to be shelling out $2000 so that I could get something like a Ryzen AI 395+ with 128GB of fast RAM for local AI, or an equivalent Mac Studio.

That’s definitely not because I’m “lazy,” it’s because I can’t run a decent model on a raspberry pi

Could you clarify more, AFAIK there is no M1 with 32gb ram machine.

M1 Pro

Well it's quite different from the M1. Please don't mix it. It like saying i3 and i7 is the same if they are on the same generation.

It's not that different. It has more cores but they're the same cores.

And higher power limit, exactly like i3 and i5 and i7. Same core architecture, just different in clock, power and core count.

I think they have the same microarchitecture but are slightly different (in, like, the number of address bits)

My m1 16gb pro gets throttled (and manually restarted) every time vs code hits 100gb ram usage when running jest unit tests. Don’t know who to blame but 99% sure the problem is my source code and not the machine.

100gb ram usage? Why not build a pc?

Considering he's got a 16GB of RAM, this is virtual memory, and most programs don't need to keep it all loaded at all times (if they do, you'll notice with constant paging exception handling).

> My m1 16gb pro gets throttled (and manually restarted) every time

Chrome eats all my resources too and I have 128GB of ram. Some pages like ClickUp and the Google cloud console (bigquery) eat something like 3-5GB

You’re chewing through 100GB of RAM on unit tests? What is filling your RAM? Are you sure that you don’t have a memory leak somewhere?

I’m certain it’s a memory leak, just not sure solving the problem is worth my time.

you could try moving your dev environment & docker into a linux VM.. could do something similar to this: https://medium.com/carvago-development/my-docker-on-macos-pa...

I mention this because I'm guessing you might be using Desktop Docker which is kinda slow.

Or maybe just switch to OrbStack: https://orbstack.dev/

Won’t change how slow it is to run docker containers in VMs on macOS.

OrbStack’s docker and VMs are lightning fast.

docker definitely runs faster inside linux running in a VM on macOS. funny how that works given the overhead on running a VM, but it seems running on a linux & ext4fs interfaces give it quite a performance boost.

OSX file I/O is really, really slow with large amounts of small files. Wondering if Apple will ever fix that.

Same here. I have an M1 Max with 64GB and the only time I notice a slowdown is doing Rust release builds with `lto = true` and `codegen-units = 1`, which makes complete sense. Otherwise there is _plenty_ of multicore performance for debug builds, webdev, web browsing, etc., often all at once.

Fill out your SSD to 90% or more (and keep it there), and you'll understand how quickly things can go south.

Why would I ever do that?

You paid for that capacity to be able to use it?

I pay so that I only fill up to 50% usually

This requires you either being very good at predicting your storage needs, your storage not growing over time (no growing photo collection?), and being aware how flash wear affects SSDs and how wear levelling works.

If you fail at these, you can even trash your SSD and need replacing the whole laptop due to it being soldered in.

I have i7-4790k that still seems to score almost 1500 on single core benchmark: that thing felt fast for decade+.

But it burns a hole in your lap while doing so probably.

And yet, it allows the user to experience true freedom unlike Apple's offerings.

Care to elaborate on this? I get that iOS is a closed system but I’ve never felt limited by Apple in what I can do with my Macbook.

I guess the hardware is extremely locked down. That part is a drag. Application sharing limitations (needing to publish to the app store, more or less) still feels wrong after all these years. There's more but those are the ones that bother me with any frequency

Need to publish to the app store? I have precisely zero app store applications installed. All just downloaded DMGs from the vendor’s website.

There is no decent option on an alternative operating system. I do not like macOS and its many quirks, especially its extremely gatekept nature, including the system being SURE that what IT wants is the best for me; I understand that this might be an approach that some people prefer, but in my case it's the equivalent of showing a bull a red cloth.

I will say this - and most will not like this - that I'd go out and buy a M* MacBook if they still kept Boot Camp around and let me install Windows 11 ARM on it. I've heard Linux is pretty OK nowadays, but I have some... ideological differences with the staff behind Asahi and it is still a wonky hack that Apple can put their foot down on any day.

Why not virtualise (?) with Parallels? Runs like a beast (M1 mba).

Because I'd prefer to run bare metal and, if I recall correctly, macOS still hogs up 50+ GB on a clean install - and there is no GPU acceleration(? - might be wrong here).

Most laptops sit on a desk and never see a lap, even Macs.

Benchmarking how long people could sit with a laptop on their lap while running Geekbench could be an interesting metric though.

I can't even remember PCs now (been 10+ years on Macs) but heat is still an issue (especially in summer in hot climates) if the thing is going to throttle.

I've got a laptop of the times when you switched to a Mac. It's warm in winter, which is nice, but not so warm to be a problem in summer. My workloads are mild, Django and Rails. Even the test suites are not CPU bound. Linux, not Windows.

Heat is an issue with Macs too: if it wasn't, you'd have Air chassis with the performance of M4 Max/Ultra.

Yes, they've done some nice things to get the performance and energy efficiency up, but it's not like they've got some magic bullet either. From what I've seen in reviews, Intel is not so far off with things like Ultra 7 258V. If they caught up to TSCM on the process node, they would probably match Apple too.

It's an old desktop built in 2014 or 2015 that I never used on my lap.

This was a reply to "never having had a computer that felt fast for so long".

For some tasks, this CPU with the GTX 970 still feels faster than MacBook M2 or recent Ryzen laptop APU.

Not really - I bought an M4 Air to check how my dev ecosystem (.NET) would run on the ARM/Apple silicon and while its usable its noticeably slowing me down in my day to day with Rider. I will be getting the M5 pro because the performance is a bottleneck for me (even incremental builds take a while). Also I regret not getting at least 30gb ram (Amazon only had 24gb configurations) because with docker running I constantly hit the memory pressure thresholds .

Which is not to say that the Air is a bad device, its an amazing laptop (especially for the price, I have not seen a single Windows laptop with this build quality even at 2x price) and the performance is good - that if I was doing something like VSCode and node/frontend only it would be more than enough.

But also people here oversell its capabilities, if you need anything more CPU/Memory intensive PRO is a must, and the "Apple needs less ram because of the fast IO/memory" argument is a myth.

Have you checked what is slowing it down?

I wonder if it’s Docker as it runs in a VM on macOS.

You can control how much RAM gets allocated to the Docker VM and I keep that at 2GB which is not that much. I am not running stuff inside docker locally just using it to boot up stuff like pg/rmq/redis

Just everything syphoning down RAM, standard office/desktop stuff like Slack, Chrome, Mail, Calendar, Messages, a few IMs will easily eat up over 12 GB, then add in VSCode, Rider, Docker (which I cap at 2 GB ram) - I am swapping gigabytes when I have multiple tools running.

But even when I kill all processes and just run a build you can see lack of cores slow the build down enough that it is noticeable. Investing into a 48gb ram/pro version will definitely be worth it for the improved experience, I can get by in the meantime by working more on my desktop workstation.

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