7 ms·

What a bizarre suggestion in this context. I get that remote development is a thing some people prefer, and if you have an underpowered machine it can be great

What a bizarre suggestion in this context. I get that remote development is a thing some people prefer, and if you have an underpowered machine it can be great to just use it as a thin-client and get all the power and performance you need without running down your battery or spending a fortune on local hardware. BUT... you're recommending this as a workaround for limitations in expensive "Pro" local development machines, as part of an encouragement to go ahead and buy them. Why not follow your advice and buy an old refurbed Macbook. Or any 2nd-hand machine of any brand. Or a low-end Chromebook. To clarify: I'm not saying remote dev is bad, or you shouldn't recommend it. It's just really really weird to do so in this specific context.

webmobdev 6y ago
> BUT... you're recommending this as a workaround for limitations in expensive "Pro" local development machines, as part of an encouragement to go ahead and buy them. Yeah, I came to say the same thing - if you are anyway going to do remote dev, why still bother buying a new Apple device?? Anything else will do fine too!
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Yes and no. For starters, there's reliability and durability. There might even be resale value. Just because you don't want to go all in (i.e., MBP) - or can't - doesn't mean you want to own a piece of junk. I'm not disagreeing with you per se. Simply pointing out there are other considerations when selecting hardward.
  - jack_pp 6y ago
    There are very reliable and durable machines for cheap, stuff like thinkpad t480+ or the x1 carbon 6+ gen. For example : https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-6th-Gen-i7-8550U-16GB-256GB-SSD-Backlit-Touchscreen/313313154075?hash=item48f2eb541b:g:ETgAAOSwxe9fu9wq https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-6th-Gen-i...
    - twblalock 6y ago
      I wouldn't be willing to do my work on a used laptop from eBay. I want something that has a warranty so I can get a replacement if something goes wrong, ideally on the same day. I don't think my manager would take it well if I told him that my used eBay Thinkpad is broken and I need to find a replacement before I can work again.
      - sebmellen 6y ago
        If you're diligent with your backups, I guarantee you can buy another eBay/Craigslist Thinkpad and get it working before you get a "Genius Bar" appointment.
        ApolloRising 6y ago
        A week minimum from what I've seen in the past few weeks.
        sebmellen 6y ago
        Ah, fair caveat. I suppose the pandemic has changed things. I haven't bought myself a new computer in a few years, but last time I did, Craigslist was full to the brim with sellers.
        pardner 6y ago
        Thats IF your local Apple store is even taking appointments; none on Oahu are. Plus there's apparently significant parts delay no matter where you get the repair done. It took Apple 32 days to get my MBP 16" repaired, returned under Crapplecare.
      - NoSorryCannot 6y ago
        Yes, if you need that kind of service, then you're going to have to pay for it. That goes without saying. Better yet, get the office to pay for it, if they're going to be so demanding.
- raarts 6y ago
  Battery life?
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    Cheaper to buy a powerbank for laptop then invest in a crippled yet costly Apple product just for battery.
- flemhans 6y ago
  > if you are anyway going to do remote dev, why still bother buying a new Apple device?? For me it'd be because of the User Interface.
  - Kwpolska 6y ago
    If you want the macOS user interface, just buy an Intel Mac — new, used, or refurbished; they are still on sale, they still work (and they support all the tools you want perfectly).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- drewg123 6y ago
  The battery. My desktop is an AMD Threadripper 299WX running FreeBSD. My laptop is a mid-2014 MBP. I can build a kernel about 8x faster on the AMD than in a VM on the mac. So when I'm away from my desk, I use the MBP to ssh to the AMD and do all my dev there. My biggest problem with my current MBP is that the battery life is down to 1-2 hours. Less if I have a video call. I could maybe just use a chromebook or windows laptop, but the Mac "just works" for all kinds of corporate stuff and is the path of least resistance.
  - capableweb 6y ago
    You had it since 2014 so the battery is tired, you'll get less and less usage out of your battery over time. That's why professional laptops lets you change the battery. As we're professionals, we use our laptops a lot, so the battery needs to be exchangeable without having to buy a new laptop, so you can restore the same battery life as you had to initially. Now any professional laptop (except the "modern" Apple ones) let you change the battery, if you don't want to do 3rd party repairs yourself. But I highly recommend you either change your battery in a repair shop, or get a laptop meant for professionals, ThinkPads are pretty good in that area. And if you do a lot of remote dev, it doesn't really matter which one, as long as it has a good WiFi card so remote latency/jitter gets as low as possible.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  I basically use the same setup (an old mbp paired with a beefy linux workstation for remote development) and the only things that keep me from migrating away to a thinkpad running linux is because I'm still doing some ios and mac development. But so far remote development with vscode is working great with very low friction. It feels like I'm working locally even when I'm outside my home network.
noelsusman 6y ago
Yeah this makes no sense. I replaced my work computer with a cheap fanless NUC and moved to fully remote development, but the whole point of that is being able to work on whatever cheap hardware I can get my hands on. Buying one of the most expensive laptops on the market and then not using any of its hardware is nonsensical.
- m_mueller 6y ago
  Well is it one of the most expensive? MBA baseline could be had for 1000, the one I’d pick with 16GB for 1200. I challenge you to find me anything with such high build quality, screen and inputs, not to speak of a chip that is measurably the fastest and most efficient for any task you still want to do locally. I’ve been away from macs for couple of years, but these M1s are IMO a game changer.
  - nickjj 6y ago
    > I’ve been away from macs for couple of years, but these M1s are IMO a game changer. The interesting thing here is, is it really a game changer in practice for something like web development and every day computer usage? I'm not here to start a mac vs windows war but I have a 6 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU (4 cores, no HT) with 16gb of memory and a first gen SSD. I use this workstation for full time development / ops work on Windows with WSL 2 / Docker, etc.. Everything is still pretty damn fast and it feels no different than the day I put together the machine. Opening Chrome from hotkey to being able to type takes a second. Opening a terminal feels instant. Working with Vim and 50+ plugins has no type delay. Disk I/O feels good. I can keep multiple VMs running, run multiple Dockerized large web apps in various web frameworks, open 20+ tabs in a browser and a bunch of other stuff and it doesn't break a sweat. Sometimes I forget that I have image editors and other stuff open in virtual workspaces too. I also do a lot of screencast recording / editing. The only part of my workflow that feels sluggish at times is rendering videos but that ends up being a non-issue because if I need to export 75 videos for a course I queue them up before I goto sleep and it finishes before I wake up the next morning. For 10-20 minute videos here and there I just render them before doing something where I go AFK (showering, eating, going outside, etc.). I guess what I'm getting at here is, I'm not sure how a faster CPU will really help that much in my day to day besides crushing benchmarks. Are folks running non-M1 MBPs experiencing slow downs in their day to day where they feel compelled to get one with an M1? Where do you see and feel the performance wins in practice?
wjossey 6y ago
Is it a bizarre suggestion? The laptop seems pretty wonderful by all accounts. Low power draw, amazing battery life, great OS (I’m still a fan), great mouse, I like the keyboards (blasphemy I know)... So, if I like all those things, but I can’t build a docker image locally (for now), why not just do something that will potentially improve my development experience in addition to allowing me to use this machine? I mean, folks should do what they want. But, I’d say calling this recommendation bizarre to be a bit over the top :)
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  It’s certainly weird to spend $1-2k on a high end laptop and then have to do workarounds to run one of the more important pieces of software in the current technical stack. I personally would wait until Docker works, if that was a problem for me.
- mongol 6y ago
  As you said yourself, 'I’ve found remote development to be really fantastic as an option on a personal “underpowered” laptop. ' I totally believe that, but the question is, how good of an option is it for a powerful, expensive laptop.
  - wjossey 6y ago
    I usually draw the line for local vs. remote if I'm spinning up multiple services. In particular, if I'm using something like minikube to do end to end testing (I develop tooling on top of Kubernetes), remote development is far superior because I can offload a bunch of the heavy lifting away from my development machine. It's pretty easy to peg one's CPUs using Docker & K8, resulting in CPU throttling and just a slower experience locally. If I were in IT, I'd not be buying M1 laptops right now for the company. However, for a personal development workhorse, I'd jump on it. I wouldn't miss local docker.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    I have always supposed that something that works great on an underpowered laptop would work even better on a full-power laptop.
tshaddox 6y ago
> BUT... you're recommending this as a workaround for limitations in expensive "Pro" local development machines, as part of an encouragement to go ahead and buy them. I agree with that in principle, but in practice Docker development on Intel MacOS already performs so poorly that it’s effectively broken anyway. I’ve actually been looking forward to Apple Silicon in the hopes that Docker starts over again and gets things working without the constant CPU pegging and 5-10x performance penalty.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  > 5-10x performance penalty. I don't use Docker on Mac, but I'm curious how much of the performance penalty is attributable to VirtualBox. I use a VirtualBox-based Vagrant environment, and the performance is awful. It mostly comes down to terrible disk performance due to how VBox shares directories from inside the VM to the host filesystem. Apparently it can be fixed entirely by switching to local NFS, but I haven't had any success getting that working.
  - closeparen 6y ago
    Docker for Mac uses a native hypervisor framework now, VirtualBox is not involved.
- PopsiclePete 6y ago
  I’ve been using docked on macOS for the past 5 years and it’s been quite pleasant. I had a few times when CPU was spiking and that was fixed with subsequent patches. Definitely over a year ago. I don’t think “constant CPU pegging” is a typical docker-on-Mac experience?
herpderperator 6y ago
It's bizzare to want to run Docker on a Mac anyway. Docker has never and will never run on a Mac natively. The way it works on Intel-based Macs is through the xhyve/hyperkit hypervisor, i.e. it virtualises Linux. That's the only way it can work. It's also why you can limit how many CPU cores and RAM Docker can use, since you're just giving the underlying virtual machine those limits through the Docker settings app. And it's just a memory hog. It will eat RAM up to the amount you specify rather than dynamically allocating and deallocating as per the requirements of each running container like on Linux. It shocks me that so many people want to run Docker on a platform it was never built for. The suggestion above is not bizzare, it's a normal use case: run Docker on Linux like it's meant to be run. Docker for Mac has had performance issues for years, especially related to file I/O. The common suggestion is to use NFS to get around those, which is just ridiculous when you think about it. [0] [0] https://vivait.co.uk/labs/docker-for-mac-performance-using-nfs https://vivait.co.uk/labs/docker-for-mac-performance-using-n...
- weaksauce 6y ago
  > It shocks me that so many people want to run Docker on a platform it was never built for. surely you can imagine a situation in which a developer prefers to develop on a mac but wants to deploy to a linux server though? that's the use case here.
  - chipsa 6y ago
    Seems like the sensible solution is to have a linux VM and do push everything into the VM to run. Which is what Docker on Mac apparently does, but with less control over doing it yourself. This is the exact workflow that VSCode w/ remote is supposed to enable: you just connect to the VM and everything works. VM could be somewhere else. Or it could be on the local machine. Doesn't matter.
    - robertlagrant 6y ago
      It's not the same flow. What if I want to use docker-compose to spin up some services locally and test them? How does a linux VM help me compared to just running docker-compose up and having the details of needing a VM abstracted away?
girvo 6y ago
I explicitly bought the top of the range i7 based 2020 13” MacBook Pro for this reason; while I guessed that the Apple Silicon MBPs were going to be even faster, I rely entirely on Docker and other fiddly dev tools for my job, and I figured the edges wouldn’t be smoothed out for at least 12 months or so.

webmobdev 6y ago

> BUT... you're recommending this as a workaround for limitations in expensive "Pro" local development machines, as part of an encouragement to go ahead and buy them. Yeah, I came to say the same thing - if you are anyway going to do remote dev, why still bother buying a new Apple device?? Anything else will do fine too!

chiefalchemist 6y ago
Yes and no. For starters, there's reliability and durability. There might even be resale value. Just because you don't want to go all in (i.e., MBP) - or can't - doesn't mean you want to own a piece of junk. I'm not disagreeing with you per se. Simply pointing out there are other considerations when selecting hardward.
- jack_pp 6y ago
  There are very reliable and durable machines for cheap, stuff like thinkpad t480+ or the x1 carbon 6+ gen. For example : https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-6th-Gen-i7-8550U-16GB-256GB-SSD-Backlit-Touchscreen/313313154075?hash=item48f2eb541b:g:ETgAAOSwxe9fu9wq https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-6th-Gen-i...
  - twblalock 6y ago
    I wouldn't be willing to do my work on a used laptop from eBay. I want something that has a warranty so I can get a replacement if something goes wrong, ideally on the same day. I don't think my manager would take it well if I told him that my used eBay Thinkpad is broken and I need to find a replacement before I can work again.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      If you're diligent with your backups, I guarantee you can buy another eBay/Craigslist Thinkpad and get it working before you get a "Genius Bar" appointment.
      - ApolloRising 6y ago
        A week minimum from what I've seen in the past few weeks.
        sebmellen 6y ago
        Ah, fair caveat. I suppose the pandemic has changed things. I haven't bought myself a new computer in a few years, but last time I did, Craigslist was full to the brim with sellers.
      - pardner 6y ago
        Thats IF your local Apple store is even taking appointments; none on Oahu are. Plus there's apparently significant parts delay no matter where you get the repair done. It took Apple 32 days to get my MBP 16" repaired, returned under Crapplecare.
    - NoSorryCannot 6y ago
      Yes, if you need that kind of service, then you're going to have to pay for it. That goes without saying. Better yet, get the office to pay for it, if they're going to be so demanding.
raarts 6y ago
Battery life?
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Cheaper to buy a powerbank for laptop then invest in a crippled yet costly Apple product just for battery.
flemhans 6y ago
> if you are anyway going to do remote dev, why still bother buying a new Apple device?? For me it'd be because of the User Interface.
- Kwpolska 6y ago
  If you want the macOS user interface, just buy an Intel Mac — new, used, or refurbished; they are still on sale, they still work (and they support all the tools you want perfectly).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
drewg123 6y ago
The battery. My desktop is an AMD Threadripper 299WX running FreeBSD. My laptop is a mid-2014 MBP. I can build a kernel about 8x faster on the AMD than in a VM on the mac. So when I'm away from my desk, I use the MBP to ssh to the AMD and do all my dev there. My biggest problem with my current MBP is that the battery life is down to 1-2 hours. Less if I have a video call. I could maybe just use a chromebook or windows laptop, but the Mac "just works" for all kinds of corporate stuff and is the path of least resistance.
- capableweb 6y ago
  You had it since 2014 so the battery is tired, you'll get less and less usage out of your battery over time. That's why professional laptops lets you change the battery. As we're professionals, we use our laptops a lot, so the battery needs to be exchangeable without having to buy a new laptop, so you can restore the same battery life as you had to initially. Now any professional laptop (except the "modern" Apple ones) let you change the battery, if you don't want to do 3rd party repairs yourself. But I highly recommend you either change your battery in a repair shop, or get a laptop meant for professionals, ThinkPads are pretty good in that area. And if you do a lot of remote dev, it doesn't really matter which one, as long as it has a good WiFi card so remote latency/jitter gets as low as possible.
neurostimulant 6y ago
I basically use the same setup (an old mbp paired with a beefy linux workstation for remote development) and the only things that keep me from migrating away to a thinkpad running linux is because I'm still doing some ios and mac development. But so far remote development with vscode is working great with very low friction. It feels like I'm working locally even when I'm outside my home network.

noelsusman 6y ago

Yeah this makes no sense. I replaced my work computer with a cheap fanless NUC and moved to fully remote development, but the whole point of that is being able to work on whatever cheap hardware I can get my hands on. Buying one of the most expensive laptops on the market and then not using any of its hardware is nonsensical.

m_mueller 6y ago
Well is it one of the most expensive? MBA baseline could be had for 1000, the one I’d pick with 16GB for 1200. I challenge you to find me anything with such high build quality, screen and inputs, not to speak of a chip that is measurably the fastest and most efficient for any task you still want to do locally. I’ve been away from macs for couple of years, but these M1s are IMO a game changer.
- nickjj 6y ago
  > I’ve been away from macs for couple of years, but these M1s are IMO a game changer. The interesting thing here is, is it really a game changer in practice for something like web development and every day computer usage? I'm not here to start a mac vs windows war but I have a 6 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU (4 cores, no HT) with 16gb of memory and a first gen SSD. I use this workstation for full time development / ops work on Windows with WSL 2 / Docker, etc.. Everything is still pretty damn fast and it feels no different than the day I put together the machine. Opening Chrome from hotkey to being able to type takes a second. Opening a terminal feels instant. Working with Vim and 50+ plugins has no type delay. Disk I/O feels good. I can keep multiple VMs running, run multiple Dockerized large web apps in various web frameworks, open 20+ tabs in a browser and a bunch of other stuff and it doesn't break a sweat. Sometimes I forget that I have image editors and other stuff open in virtual workspaces too. I also do a lot of screencast recording / editing. The only part of my workflow that feels sluggish at times is rendering videos but that ends up being a non-issue because if I need to export 75 videos for a course I queue them up before I goto sleep and it finishes before I wake up the next morning. For 10-20 minute videos here and there I just render them before doing something where I go AFK (showering, eating, going outside, etc.). I guess what I'm getting at here is, I'm not sure how a faster CPU will really help that much in my day to day besides crushing benchmarks. Are folks running non-M1 MBPs experiencing slow downs in their day to day where they feel compelled to get one with an M1? Where do you see and feel the performance wins in practice?

wjossey 6y ago

Is it a bizarre suggestion? The laptop seems pretty wonderful by all accounts. Low power draw, amazing battery life, great OS (I’m still a fan), great mouse, I like the keyboards (blasphemy I know)... So, if I like all those things, but I can’t build a docker image locally (for now), why not just do something that will potentially improve my development experience in addition to allowing me to use this machine? I mean, folks should do what they want. But, I’d say calling this recommendation bizarre to be a bit over the top :)

ashtonkem 6y ago
It’s certainly weird to spend $1-2k on a high end laptop and then have to do workarounds to run one of the more important pieces of software in the current technical stack. I personally would wait until Docker works, if that was a problem for me.
mongol 6y ago
As you said yourself, 'I’ve found remote development to be really fantastic as an option on a personal “underpowered” laptop. ' I totally believe that, but the question is, how good of an option is it for a powerful, expensive laptop.
- wjossey 6y ago
  I usually draw the line for local vs. remote if I'm spinning up multiple services. In particular, if I'm using something like minikube to do end to end testing (I develop tooling on top of Kubernetes), remote development is far superior because I can offload a bunch of the heavy lifting away from my development machine. It's pretty easy to peg one's CPUs using Docker & K8, resulting in CPU throttling and just a slower experience locally. If I were in IT, I'd not be buying M1 laptops right now for the company. However, for a personal development workhorse, I'd jump on it. I wouldn't miss local docker.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  I have always supposed that something that works great on an underpowered laptop would work even better on a full-power laptop.

tshaddox 6y ago

> BUT... you're recommending this as a workaround for limitations in expensive "Pro" local development machines, as part of an encouragement to go ahead and buy them. I agree with that in principle, but in practice Docker development on Intel MacOS already performs so poorly that it’s effectively broken anyway. I’ve actually been looking forward to Apple Silicon in the hopes that Docker starts over again and gets things working without the constant CPU pegging and 5-10x performance penalty.

rootusrootus 6y ago
> 5-10x performance penalty. I don't use Docker on Mac, but I'm curious how much of the performance penalty is attributable to VirtualBox. I use a VirtualBox-based Vagrant environment, and the performance is awful. It mostly comes down to terrible disk performance due to how VBox shares directories from inside the VM to the host filesystem. Apparently it can be fixed entirely by switching to local NFS, but I haven't had any success getting that working.
- closeparen 6y ago
  Docker for Mac uses a native hypervisor framework now, VirtualBox is not involved.
PopsiclePete 6y ago
I’ve been using docked on macOS for the past 5 years and it’s been quite pleasant. I had a few times when CPU was spiking and that was fixed with subsequent patches. Definitely over a year ago. I don’t think “constant CPU pegging” is a typical docker-on-Mac experience?

herpderperator 6y ago

It's bizzare to want to run Docker on a Mac anyway. Docker has never and will never run on a Mac natively. The way it works on Intel-based Macs is through the xhyve/hyperkit hypervisor, i.e. it virtualises Linux. That's the only way it can work. It's also why you can limit how many CPU cores and RAM Docker can use, since you're just giving the underlying virtual machine those limits through the Docker settings app. And it's just a memory hog. It will eat RAM up to the amount you specify rather than dynamically allocating and deallocating as per the requirements of each running container like on Linux. It shocks me that so many people want to run Docker on a platform it was never built for. The suggestion above is not bizzare, it's a normal use case: run Docker on Linux like it's meant to be run. Docker for Mac has had performance issues for years, especially related to file I/O. The common suggestion is to use NFS to get around those, which is just ridiculous when you think about it. [0] [0] https://vivait.co.uk/labs/docker-for-mac-performance-using-nfs https://vivait.co.uk/labs/docker-for-mac-performance-using-n...

weaksauce 6y ago
> It shocks me that so many people want to run Docker on a platform it was never built for. surely you can imagine a situation in which a developer prefers to develop on a mac but wants to deploy to a linux server though? that's the use case here.
- chipsa 6y ago
  Seems like the sensible solution is to have a linux VM and do push everything into the VM to run. Which is what Docker on Mac apparently does, but with less control over doing it yourself. This is the exact workflow that VSCode w/ remote is supposed to enable: you just connect to the VM and everything works. VM could be somewhere else. Or it could be on the local machine. Doesn't matter.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    It's not the same flow. What if I want to use docker-compose to spin up some services locally and test them? How does a linux VM help me compared to just running docker-compose up and having the details of needing a VM abstracted away?

girvo 6y ago

I explicitly bought the top of the range i7 based 2020 13” MacBook Pro for this reason; while I guessed that the Apple Silicon MBPs were going to be even faster, I rely entirely on Docker and other fiddly dev tools for my job, and I figured the edges wouldn’t be smoothed out for at least 12 months or so.