I've been using M1 for 1.5 months. Here's my experience as a coding SaaS founder

[alexanderisora]

I have bought M1 MacBook Air 13" 16GB In January 2021. Here are my thoughts on this machine so far.

Speed. Aww yeah, it is lightning fast! My daily setup: Postgres, VScode (+48 plugins), Sublime Text, Slack, Discord, Spotify, Thunderbird, Telegram, Chrome, Firefox, iTerm, Figma, Alfred. All simultaneously. Not a single freeze so far. Each app opens instantly.

Apps. As you know, there is a chip incompatibility issue. And there is something called Rosetta to fix it. So I expected some problems with apps. But in reality, I did not have to care about this. There's no difference between M1 and Intel to me.

What went wrong. My biggest fear was not being able to launch my development environment. When I typed brew install [email protected] in the terminal I got this error: "The x86_64 architecture is required for this software.". It instantly made me pale because this means I will have to carry 2 laptops to be able to code my product The problem was solved quickly by upgrading the project to a newer version of Python. Thank goodness our dependencies did not mess up because of the update. The next problem was nodejs v11 which was needed to launch the product locally. yarn start took ~2 hours (HOURS!) to launch. Each update took ~5 minutes to compile. The development process was awful. I got pale again The problem was solved by moving to a newer nodejs version. Again, the dependencies did not break up. But the things could easily mess up because nodejs dependencies are complicated as hell. Now it compiles instantly, yarn build takes 30 sec.

Keyboard. It is much better than the previous generations have. Apple has fixed it. It is not as brilliant as the old one from my MacBook Pro 2012, but still fine.

Why Air, not Pro. AFAIK, the Pro version has these differences: better battery, better mic + sound, more ports (+2). I did not find these features significant enough to pay extra. And I also dislike Touch Bar.

[patatino]

How is the heat? Does it stay cool? I have a 2018 MacBook pro for work, and it is the worst.

I hate two things, fan noise and a hot laptop, so I'm very excited to get a new one sometime soon.

[alexanderisora]

When I actively compile stuff, it gets slightly warm. 95% of time it is cold.

I assume if you code/build actively being in a warm room or under the sun, it will get too hot.

[colesantiago]

How has Docker been for you, I am also considering running Windows on it or maybe Linux possibly with near native performance.

Is this good to go?

[abana]

I am using Docker Preview 3.1.0(60984) with the Air, and its super fast. A build process that usually takes 5 seconds on a maxed out intel MacBook Pro takes a few milliseconds on M1 Air (16GB). Docker crashed once or twice within the last month but nothing major, just restarted the Docker engine and it was fine.

edit YMMV. I use Docker with a NodeJS stack.

[mariust]

It should be better now: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/apple-m1/

But there is no autoupdate

[alexanderisora]

I'm sorry I do not use Docker. So I can not comment on that. I also did not try to run Windows or Linux on the machine.

[lignux]

Why is the title so clickbaity? Feel like i'm on YT.

[alexanderisora]

What title would you suggest?

[spondyl]

re: x86 for python, I just run my terminal under Rosetta and I haven't had any troubles at all

[alexanderisora]

I did not think about such a trick when I was digging the problem.

My current setup (python v3.8 and node v12) runs well both with or without Rosetta.