Man, the M1 Macs are the first piece of tech in a while that I’ve felt myself actively pining over. They just seem… really goddamn fast. Everybody talks about it so glowingly.
Hoping I can pick one up soon. I figure the Pro is probably the right move for a developer workload, although I do like the size of the Air.
I got an Air last spring, and yeah--it is really quick. Though I will say, my workload didn't see the sort of absurd speedup that some reviewers ogle about. I also still don't have a comfortable dev experience on the M1, because the world just isn't ARM-centric (yet). It's a great secondary computer, but unless you're an Apple developer, you should expect friction.
I recently built a 12th-gen Intel workstation for my main dev machine, because x86 is still the path of least resistance for the type of work I do. It's got a ton more cores, a higher memory ceiling, and faster storage than the MacBook. I'd choose this over a Mac Studio, too; because I built it for a third of the price. I love my Macs, but I'm enjoying linux (again, for the type of work I do). Different strokes, etc.
> Though I will say, my workload didn't see the sort of absurd speedup that some reviewers ogle about.
Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster.
It’s almost as fast as a modern AMD/Intel desktop, which is really amazing in a laptop form factor. But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.
Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.
> But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.
I don't know. The M1 Macs (we have two of them now) accomplish what Intel/AMD spent 2013+ trying and largely failing to do - maximizing battery life without compromising on performance. The suckers are fast. They're not the fastest kits of hardware out there, but they're certainly within shooting distance.
They do this without having a bulky chassis, multiple fans running constantly, or needing to be tethered to a power chord. They've been available for close to a year and a half now(?) and, unless if I've missed something, Intel/AMD still don't have a viable competitor.
Now, I completely agree that the software environment still hasn't completely caught up. But for my use case that's ok - give me a working shell terminal, web browser, and word processor, and I'm happy. I'm also lucky enough that I have a very well equipped remote system that I can push my actual work to. If I had to use my laptop for development, it may very well be a different story, but that's the trade off you make for being an early adopter.
> Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster.
You make it sound like the reviewers mindlessly regurgitate Apple’s material. Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s have numbers very close to Apple’s figures.
Now, you get diminishing returns in a lot of daily tasks so perceived performance is not proportional to benchmark scores (a 2x speedup when you open an application is not very meaningful when it took 0.5s anyway). But it does not mean that the reviews were inaccurate.
> But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.
More like leapfrogging. Which is fine, AMD and Intel are doing it all the time and the world is not ending for either company.
The narrative is that it is faster than anything else at equivalent power consumption. Sure, you can get overclocked i9s that are faster, but not in a laptop with a ~1 day battery life.
> Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.
We’ll see. As usual, the truth will be in the numbers.
It’s not completely absurd that something larger than a 3090 with vastly better memory bandwidth could be competitive. The M1 is going to be worse at things like ray tracing, most probably, but the 3090 itself is not more magic than M1s.
I feel that the M1 still has the real distortion field working for it. But on the other hand I just bought the new iPad Air (my original Air still works fine but I thought 10years was enough). The fact that a decent pro laptop class or mini desktop class CPU fits in a tablet with no cooling and gives me over 10hrs of useful work is kinda crazy.
> I also still don't have a comfortable dev experience on the M1
Interesting. What is that you dev?
I'm not an apple developer at all, but my dev experience with both Java and Go has been pretty frictionless.
My Air is my secondary machine, but that's only really because my workstation is a 16 core/64GB AMD machine and does our product build and test run in about half the time the Air does, which itself is half or less the time previous laptops did. But in the few months that this machine was in transit, the Air did a great job.
> I'm not an apple developer at all, but my dev experience with both Java and Go has been pretty frictionless.
Same. Java, Go, and web dev is my every day. Not an exactly fair comparison, but my first M1 MBA replaced a 2017 MBP, and it cut my java test suit times in half. 16GB wasn't quite enough RAM for all I do so now I'm a 64gb MBP M1.
I've thought about building a Ryzen desktop and just running linux, but I don't want to split between two machines and need to be mobile.
I'll chime in here. I have the same experience (Julia, R, JS, and a little bit of C/Python). I have an M1 laptop that I use constantly, but I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity to remote into my working environment.
If I had to use my M1 laptop has my main development machine, I would think very hard about trying to pick up a T14 or something similar.
Library compatibility issues, in particular with Julia and R.
It's gotten much better over the last year, but I still run into enough problems that I try to keep all of my actual development work on a remote machine.
A few years ago I was using R on OpenBSD. OpenBSD somewhat aggressively removes deprecated features as compared to Linux and macOS. It was really eye-opening to see how bit-rotted some parts of the scientific / numeric ecosystem are. I ended up submitting some trivial PRs deep in the stack for use of system calls that have been deprecated but not removed from Linux for a decade or more.
I ran into some of these. Many npm projects that use native plugins to node don't (or didn't) work on M1. Had to spend a bunch of time finding alternatives. For my needs though things are now working.
Have you tried AMD? I don't know if they're suitable for your work, but I personally think AMD is great. Works well with Linux. They're definitely more open than Intel.
And I felt (perhaps incorrectly) that you get more horsepower for your buck with AMD.
I always buy AMD, but for another reason altogether. The process market could very easily become a single-player monopoly. Maybe less today, but that was certainly the case for a very long time. Thus, I always try to buy from the second- or third- place market leader. Diversity in hardware, just like software or biology, is good for the environment as a whole.
Love me some AMD, running them on all my machines currently.
However on desktop where power usage isn't an issue, Intel 12th gen performance has pulled ahead of AMD. Theoretically even on laptops too but I suspect they have the common problem of powerful Intel cpus in laptops where they cooling just can't hack it and they throttle to make it worthless getting top end Intel. So I believe AMD is still better on laptops presently.
I don't disagree, but it is worth pointing out that Alder Lake released Nov 2021, one year after Zen 3 (Nov 2020). It'll be interesting to see what happens in the fight between Zen 4 and Raptor Lake. Right now feels like an awkward time to build a PC.
Add in ATX 3.0, ATX12VO 2.0, the new ATX12VHPWR connector, the I_PSU% feature, the beginning of PCIe 5.0, and the beginning and relative immaturity of DDR5…
… right now I say to wait until the end of 2022 for a build. Let Zen 4 and Raptor Lake come out. Then realize Zen 5 and Comet Lake are likely another very real step above that the following year, though at least you’ll be able to take your new PSU, memory and GPU along with.
Never mind the reality that Apple is just getting started.
Granted, you can’t wait forever. I did a build last year, and now get to see how things shake out as all the new stuff comes available over the next few years.
That would be a departure from the norm for Intel.
Do you have any sources? I was unable to find any info on Meteor Lake and board compatibility.
That said, AM4 is a dead end socket, so building right now is a coin toss between the 12900k and the 5950x as far as price and performance. I'm not sure the 13900k is going to be much of an upgrade.
I just bought a 12400 mostly because it was 15% cheaper than the 5600x and it comes with an iGPU. You're right that it's unclear whether 13th or 14th gen will be an upgrade or possible, respectively.
> It's a great secondary computer, but unless you're an Apple developer, you should expect friction.
I moved 100% of my python web development to my M1 Max. Everything is running native. Zero downside. I run Debian ARM in Parallels VMs for my test suite, and deploy to both Graviton and Intel AWS instances.
The real beauty of M1 architecture isn’t the raw speed, but the computing power per watt. This allows apple to throw a decent bit of wattage for solid performance. And very little wattage for perfectly acceptable performance (and amazing battery life). But it’s not blisteringly fast.
Would you be willing to share the details of your PC? I’d really like to build a custom Linux machine with the latest Intel CPUs, but I’ve never built a PC before and I don’t know which components are Linux-friendly.
I did no specific compatibility research, because it’s more than likely going to work out of the box with distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, and you can do some work to get things going on distros with less hand holding.
It’s an i9-12900k on a Z690 motherboard (tons of these, I got a gigabyte model). I got a terabyte of nice NVME and 64GB of memory; made it out the door for about $1600 with a case, taxes, and everything. I didn’t buy a graphics card because I don’t need to drive anything other than some text editors and browser windows, and it’s really not a buyers market right now. I’ll probably pick up something in a year or so.
If you’ve never built a computer, highly recommend! It’s really not difficult, though can take time and it can be frustrating. Really rewarding when you boot it for the first time, though.
This is extremely helpful, thank you! This is pretty much the sort of config I'd want (fast CPU and lots of RAM). I'm glad to hear you've had a good experience with this so far! :)
Historically network and graphics drivers (and maybe sound?), and sleep mode were the things to check for Linux support. These days, all three major graphics manufacturers have Linux drivers, and I haven't heard any problems with networking for a long time. Sleep is probably still an issue... And most everything is already included for you (networking, sound, graphics) on the motherboard. So just check how good Linux support is for the motherboard you'd like to buy (and any PCI cards you'll add, if any).
Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but you should be fine with most parts for most Linux builds. The main thing I would say is if you go with a dedicated graphics card go with Nvidia as their driver support is much better (though I’ve used AMD cards with no issue on Linux also). Outside of that and maybe the rare motherboard feature that doesn’t work quite as you expect (and noting that pretty much all first party software monitoring/control tools are built for windows) you should find little issue with making a build suitable for Linux.
I have two PCs at home, one with an AMD card and one with an NVidia card. I'd characterize the NVidia card on Linux as "Windows-level hassle" (i.e. small, but present) while I think about the AMD card about as often as I'd worry about USB mouse compatibility (i.e. haven't given it a thought).
EDIT: small edge to AMD for graphics cards, but both are fine if using a distribution like Ubuntu
Yeah, like I said with my own anecdote I also didn't experience any issues w/ AMD graphics cards. Actually after searching a bit maybe I had that backwards and it was actually Nvidia that was the problematic one. I haven't had problems with either, but have read about problems and I thought it was AMD, but perhaps I was mistaken.
That's really good to know! I assumed that it was generally hit-or-miss. I'm relatively new to using Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) as a daily driver and would like to keep things as turn-key as possible. At least with laptops, you seem to only get that if you're selective with which configuration you purchase.
Laptops are definitely more hit or miss given the proprietary nature of each manufacturer layout. Because PC building is so common on desktops you don't have to worry about idiosyncrasies to nearly the same degree. If this is your first build you should just expect some things escape your purview and thus you may have to troubleshoot a thing or two, but there's nothing fundamental about Linux and desktop hardware the precludes a turn-key experience.
Awesome. I’m okay with a bit of tweaking to get things going, I just want to avoid a consistently poor user experience or instability. It sounds like a sensible custom Linux PC build should be (relatively) smooth!
I agree with several siblings that if you're building a desktop the only thing you really need to think about with compatibility is graphics card, because the driver situation is complicated.
For best compatibility (and lots of other reasons) I recommend Fedora - it usually has a much more up to date kernel than most other distros.
Yeah, I'm completely satisfied. The M1 Pro is definitely the best computer for the money I've purchased, despite it costing an arm and a leg to get more RAM and SSD space.
For my workload (music production), and despite still having to run Ableton through Rosetta, it can handle roughly twice as many tracks as my 2018 MBP (which luckily is _not_ something I purchased). All my previous "problem" projects now run perfectly. And this is all while running completely silently and barely getting warm compared to my 2018 MBP, which runs fans full blast and gets super hot if I so much as glance at Ableton. Can't say I miss the hiss of the fan when I'm trying to mix tracks.
If the developers of plugins I use all the time ever get their ducks in a row and finally get around to updating them to support native ARM (that's the current limiting factor), I imagine it will be even better.
Kind of embarrassing that it's taking some devs so long.. Steve Duda managed to get Serum updated within a couple months of the original M1 release.
> Kind of embarrassing that it's taking some devs so long.. Steve Duda managed to get Serum updated within a couple months of the original M1 release.
This is seriously overstating things.
Steve has spent years continuously optimizing his code base. It was already clean and relatively free of cruft compared to code bases of similar age.
If you are developing on something like JUCE and don't have an extensive amount of optimized assembly or AVX instructions to deal with, yeah, porting is fast. Likewise if your suite uses a common framework (ala MeldaProduction, FabFilter, uHe, etc.).
NI's code base is not clean, and they have the organizational problem of developers coming, developing a product, and then leaving, orphaning the code base. Brian Clevinger is doing his own thing now with Rhizomatic, so good luck every seeing Absynth native. But NI has maintained active development of Kontakt because it is their cash cow, and thus their first native release. But Reaktor? Massive? Massive X? Nowhere in sight.
Further, like many developers, they have the added problem of VST3, which is a royal PITA to get right. Since Steinberg is trying to pull the rug out from all native VST2 development on M1, many larger developers like NI don't want to risk the potential lawsuits. They also have no choice but to push out native VST3s, since Cubase 12 does not support native VST2s.
So there are a lot of economic and technical pressures at work that you have to take into account.
I think I definitely misspoke here - I really didn't mean the devs so much as the companies that employ them. I know full well how difficult such a transition could be. Native Instruments has a ton of resources, and you'd think at the very least their most recent "flagship" synth Massive X would have seen an update by now.. which definitely points to organizational cruft more than anything. Most of the plugins I use that are created by smaller teams have already been updated.
The fact remains though that a loooot of producers use Macbook Pros, and I'm assuming many will be upgrading to M1s within the next couple years. I'm genuinely curious when the pressures will actually force these large organizations to take the transition seriously.
This is why I am very hopeful for the future of CLAP. It will give all developers a common format to target and test that can be wrapped in VST2/3/AU/AAX relatively easy. Since it has an ABI vs. and API interface, it is not subject to the vagaries of any one company's proprietary idea of how plugins will work. This will also make porting to new architectures easier.
VST2 used to be the standard development and testing target, which was then wrapped to other formats. But all of the developer workflows built around it are now at risk because of Steinberg's asshattery. I know for a fact that this has delayed a number of plugin releases, as developers have to put time into refactoring their code around a new standard target. Thank God for u-He and Bitwig leading the way here. I've tested the Surge XT CLAP build in Bitwig and it just works.
> Kind of embarrassing that it's taking some devs so long.. Steve Duda managed to get Serum updated within a couple months of the original M1 release.
Is it? Steve Duda has no choice, his lunch is getten eaten by Matt Tytel and the folks at Native Instruments. If he wants to keep selling his $150+ plugin, he better stay on the cutting edge.
For everyone else though, I find it hard to blame them. Overnight you get a complete architecture change that you need to buy test hardware for, test-compile for ARM, find out what breaks, source new ARM-compatible libraries for what dod break, re-write some/all of your codebase to account for these changes, profile the performance difference, re-evaluate if the native version is worth it, then set up a testing and CI pipeline for a second architecture. Since most of these plugins are written with the notoriously fragile JUCE framework in C++, I can see why it's not just an overnight task to get it working on Apple Silicon unless you drop everything and make it your top priority.
For everyone else though, I find it hard to blame them. Overnight you get a complete architecture change
Except it didn’t happen overnight, Apple announced it 6 months in advance. There has been affordable hardware available for porting since june 2020, almost 2 years ago. If a developer hasn’t gotten around to it by now, I doubt it is a priority for them, let alone their top priority.
Duda.. getting his lunch eaten by Native Instruments? Vital I understand (a sort-of-free Serum-like synth is certainly a competitor).. but Native Instruments hasn't done anything interesting in the VST space in years. Odd to throw that in there.
My point is that companies like Native Instruments have vastly more resources and developers than one individual developer, and still very few of their supposedly flagship products are M1 compatible. It's been a year and a half, and Massive X still isn't updated. You'd think they would toss at least one developer at it. I guess that maybe points to organizational rot more than anything (I guess Massive X generally being an outdated flop is also evidence of this), but the point stands.
I'm currently testing an M1-based Air to see if I'd like to purchase something similar. I can confirm this for sure; the project files that made my current, not-even-old Windows laptop with similar stats choke are running like a dream even on this Air.
BTW, if you have a license for Live 11, version 11.1 forward has a Universal build, so it can run natively on M1 Macs rather than through Rosetta. [0]
The parent commenter's problem sounds like it's third-party plugins rather than Live itself.
FL Studio also has a build for ARM, but it runs each non-ARM plugin in a wrapper which somehow uses an entire CPU core. After loading more than a couple of plugins I see something that is otherwise unheard of on my M1 Macbook - 1000% CPU usage and fans at full speed.
So I stick to running the app via Rosetta - higher-than-average CPU usage in general, but it means my plugins behave.
Also, you can't compare io work on OSX to anything else, it's fsync () is a no-op. When file cache can stream to disk at a delay, io always looks super fast.
We've compared docker performance between Intel and M1 and the M1 falls quite a bit far behind in response times. We can't do exact comparisons due to CPU differences, but for Docker I can't say it is in a good state right now (yes we enabled the docker filesystem beta enhancement for M1). This is for x86 containers at this time.
It is much better than it was not so long ago due to actually working at all, and it appears there is much more room for optimization, so the comparison is not over yet. But as of right now, it isn't that great.
That is a strange way to put it. Rosetta 2 (and orig.) is not virtualization, it is emulation, though there is a half-decent argument that Rosetta 2 (and orig.) is not emulation either -- it is recompilation.
It’s more complex than that and the specific point being made is accurate - Rosetta 2 doesn’t support virtualisation in the sense that it cannot perform translation in the context of virtual machine.
If you run an x64 Mac binary on the host, Rosetta (simplified) translates the code to arm64 then runs it. If you run a Linux VM and execute an x64 Linux binary or container inside it, Rosetta can’t help you. You’ll be running inside a big emulator - in fact, Docker Desktop uses QEMU under the hood I think.
More accurately, Rosetta doesn't support kernel extensions, and it will not run software that virtualizes x86 machines.
But it's not as if you can't run a virtual machine native to the platform. Qemu works on M1, Parallels works on M1 (ARM VM only) and there is a preview for VMWare's Hypervisor that will run even Windows 11 on the M1, but the VM software is native code (but not necessarily the system in the VM), so Rosetta isn't used.
It’s worth noting explicitly what others have said - if you are doing what you describe, you are running your Linux containers under QEMU.
The performance of this will be terrible; there is likely little room for optimisation and you should not expect this to get any faster in the future.
Using aarch64 containers changes the game entirely. Common base images like Ubuntu are already multiarch so will just work out of the box. But this has obvious downsides and won’t be a suitable solution for everyone.
It doesn't make much of a difference. macOS Docker performance is heavily limited by really poor volume mount performance.
In one of our projects the benchmarks look like this to run our test suite for a web app using volume mounts:
- 2020 Intel MBP (10th gen CPU, 32GB of memory, SSD): 37 seconds
- First generation M1 MBP: 31 seconds
- WSL 2: 3 seconds
The WSL 2 box is an old workstation I have from 6-7 years ago with an i5 3.2ghz CPU, 16gb of RAM and one of the first SSDs. All in all it was about $800.
The WSL 2 box is so fast for Docker because the volume performance is pretty much as good as native Linux. It's really fast.
'In the real world' it isn't just Apple switching to ARM. I've been moving AWS workloads to Graviton for the cost savings. More and more default containers have both x86 and ARM available.
Well, then probably you're using fairly exotic stuff, because most widely used base images nowadays have a arm build, and for the rare cases where this is not true (usually internal company stuff) you can build it yourself.
It's also unfair to use MacOS instead of an operating system with proper container support, but sometimes "fairness" doesn't matter as much as "how the machine is going to be used"
It's actually pretty impressive how much faster Docker builds containers on M1 running in aarch Linux VM vs on Docker Desktop. But to your point about "how the machine is used", I've encountered very few devs who care.
I had a top of the line 2019 MBP docked in a dual-display setup. A YouTube video, a video call, any sort of slightly more demanding workload and the fans would be on full blast. Switch over to the battery and it’d last 2 to 4 hours for typical web dev work.
I picked up an M1 Pro last week and it really has lived up to expectations. It’s silent no matter what I throw at it, far faster, and after 5 hours of use I still have 76% remaining.
The new MBP is as game-changing as everyone claims.
It is the first laptop I can use in my lap for development without frying my balls in a long long time, I expect a jump in the fertility of software engineers in the next years.
I fully believe the M1 is game-changing, but that sounds like you're comparing it to an atrocious alternative. I have an HP Spectre x360 from 2018. The fans don't spin up unless I'm running heavy computation, and on battery, after 4 years, it still lasts about a workday.
I agree entirely. My point of reference is a laptop that was, in hindsight, a total disappointment. I'm bought into the Apple ecosystem though and it was the best Apple laptop that money could buy 3 years back.
I did look at Windows alternatives at the time but ultimately decided that I wanted to remain on Mac.
Sitting on a 2019 MBP now, I agree - this computer has been a disappointment. I'm tied to my charger for any days with more than 3 hours of planned use time.
> I picked up an M1 Pro last week and it really has lived up to expectations. It’s silent no matter what I throw at it, far faster, and after 5 hours of use I still have 76% remaining
That's what i expected too. I was really disappointed that after a two hour Teams call(browser) the battery was at 50%. I know Teams is a dumpster fire, but still, my multi year old Ubuntu XPS 13 did better than this.
I wound up in a bit of a analysis paralysis figuring out what to replace my old 2015 13” mbp pro with. As a lot of others I looked to the pros, and went down the “well if I’m spending x, then I might as well spend a little extra to get so much more”.
Long story short, I ended up buying the smallest Air available with no upgrades, and I’m so happy that I did. Unless you’re doing some serious heavy lifting it’ll be fine, and at it’s small price point it’s not something I worry about breaking. That last part may be an ADHD thing, but it does add to the experience of using a laptop around the house where you also have a car and a 3 year old.
I was on the fence about the 8gb ram, but it frankly out performs my work t14s thinkpad which has 32gb for any sort of programming I do on it.
The only real downside is the lack of the MagSafe charger, but it holds power so well that it’s rarely in the charger when I’m using it. So my advice would be to get the smallest air, unless you know why you’re getting something more powerful.
I had one of the original M1 pros. Upgraded to a 16” max fully loaded. I notice no difference in performance. The extent of my “hardcore” use is having dozens of safari tabs open.
If/when MacBook Air gets the M2 redesign (hopefully with the super nice screen), that will be the no brainer purchase of the decade.
I have moved from a 13" M1 Air to the 16" M1 Pro only because I wanted a bigger screen for traveling. I feel some buyer's remorse because it was more than twice as expensive, and I don't really care about the extra speed or memory (yet?). It's also really heavy, and I don't love its looks.
What I'd absolutely buy is a 16" MacBook Air, like an Apple version of the LG Gram.
Edit: For comparison, the 16" LG Gram with a discrete Nvidia GPU is exactly as light as the 13" M1 MacBook Air, and supposedly it has great battery life. And all those ports...sigh...
You would've not found much performance difference downgrading either if that's all of your use case. Why did you upgrade a machine that was already good enough?
> but it does add to the experience of using a laptop around the house where you also have a car and a 3 year old.
I got a 2019 MBP and my 3 year old spilled water on it. The repair cost more than an M1 Air. My next computer will be a cheap air I think. I won't feel bad upgrading early or if something happens to it.
You only need the Pro if you have some very parallizable workloads (large compilations, or heavily threaded long-running stuff), or you need ram > 16GB. In regular use or development I know I don't really touch all the extra cores developing webstacks. When I need to run VMs for mobile development I kind of miss having more ram available, I feel like I have to close all my extra applications. An Air/Mini with 32GB would be perfect for me.
> You only need the Pro if you have some very parallizable workloads (large compilations, or heavily threaded long-running stuff), or you need ram > 16GB.
Or you want a large screen, or IO, or more than one external display, …
There’s a billion reasons to want/need the pro (unlike the max).
Yes yes yes. I think Apple is scared to cannibalize the 16" Pro, although it's already quite differentiated. Pro is quite focused on media workloads rather than pure performance/dev workloads. I can see some dev workloads needing the pro, but most would be great on the base chip.
With the level of performance on the M1, I'll take the battery life and less weight on the Air over more cores. I hope the next gen base chip (M2?) will have more display output and more RAM, and the MBAir line up will have a 15/16" size (with the Pro speakers).
Lots of corporate users here who love their Macs but don't need the media features. 13" Airs are lovely, but plenty of us would go for a bigger screen if it was an option.
I bought the Air as I had a bit of a deadline for getting a new machine and could not wait for the 14 or 16 inch models to be released.
The Air is silent, it's powerful enough for fairly serious dev workloads, it has a battery that lasts longer than I've ever seen before and it can run multiple displays if you get a compatible displaylink dock.
If you like it, there's little reason not to get one AFAICT. Make sure to grab the 16GB of RAM though!
I'm not a 'product' person... but the macbook air m1, is a GAME CHANGER with having no fan whatsoever, and generating very little heat. It brings me joy everyday to use it and that rarely happens from using a physical device.
Its the first 'laptop' that I can comfortably have on my lap for hours on end
Just a heads up with this. If you want one, make sure you get an off the shelf config if you can. The turnaround times for replacements and repair is likely to be bad on non stock configurations.
This pushed me to the 14” MBP with 16GB and 1TB. You can literally get it swapped out same day at apple stores if anything goes wonky.
If you don't need more than 16GB of RAM the Air will more than likely be more than good enough for you.
The only reason I returned my Air and waited for the MacBook Pro I'm typing on now is I made the mistake of loading some games on the Air - and one game I love suffers due to my mod addiction and can really use more RAM.
And that's something that many people don't seem to realize - if you buy from Apple directly they have a two week no questions asked return policy. Obviously the machine has to work and you need to return all the parts, but if you aren't sure you could always get an Air and you have two weeks to make up your mind if it's sufficient or not.
Man, it was SO hard taking it back and waiting 9 months before the MacBook Pro's came out. So be careful - once you taste and M1 Mac it's almost impossible to go back to anything else :) At least if you decide the Air isn't for you after all you'll only have to wait at max a few weeks.
I have the air and the pro. The air is plenty fast but can be difficult when you have large RAM consumption use cases such as doing front end workloads. It also can have some visual lag if you’re plugging into a larger monitor.
The pro, though very fast, can also hang when leaving too many apps open. But I did leave way too much running. It feels blazingly fast.
You should really think about that workloads you will use in the day to day. And also consider if you’re docking it. If you are, the pro is a much safer bet and the screen brightness and size is less relevant.
So the tldr is that the 64Gb of ram is the big differentiation. The other is plugging monitors into the pro.
Anecdata but I haven't seen any display lag from the Air M1. 4k + internal display on the 8GB works fine. 4k + internal + iPad Sidecar works fine on the 16GB.
I'm also doing FE workloads, 8GB is nearly there but the swap is still fast. I still have some swap usage on the 16GB but mostly because of Chrome tabs rather than workloads.
I have a bug that when I'm using sidecar (and I think sometimes my hotkey remapper triggers it too, somehow) that causes the window server to just spiral up to a whole CPU core and like 4GB of ram... if I restart the process, all is good until the machine sleeps, or a display reconnects.
I got a MacBook Pro with the max cpu and it’s made such a difference in my day to day Kotlin work and the battery time is stunning considering how high the cpu usage is when working in IntelliJ
Hoping I can pick one up soon. I figure the Pro is probably the right move for a developer workload, although I do like the size of the Air.