5 ms·

If you don’t run Electron apps, even an older Mac will fly. My 2015 is still astoundingly fast, it just doesn’t have Chrome bogging it down.

coliveira 6y ago
Exactly, I have a 2015 MacBook that works perfectly, unless I try to use electron-based apps.
mrweasel 6y ago
You can even go back to 2013 and not notice that you’re using a 7-8 year old machine. A MacBook Pro from late 2013 runs Big Sur and performs fine for most everyday use use case and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE. You just can’t run Chrome all the well, which should tell you more about Chrome than Macs.
- hugi 6y ago
  I do all my work (java/postgres etc) on a 2012 i7 Mac Mini. It used to be my home media server but I started using it as a "temporary machine" last year after killing my 2018 15" MBP by spilling water over it. I was planning to replace it with an Apple Silicon machine once they became available, but it's performing so well I'm more than happy to keep using it while waiting for a 15" or 16" M1x/M2. Amazing little machines.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  > and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE Probably depends on the IDE and the language. My impression is that newer computers (especially in the "consumer" / "general public" market) have especially improved efficiency. They're not much faster, but they last longer on smaller batteries. My late 2013 15" (2.3 GHz / 16 GB RAM) works great with Pycharm for moderately sized projects. It's even usable for personal Rust projects (with the intellij-rust plugin). For Rust it's somewhat slower than my i5-8500 desktop but not by much. For incremental compiles, I don't feel like I'm waiting around more. The i5 mainly wins when it can use all six cores. It's however quite a bit faster than my work HP ProBook with an i5-8250U which is a much newer machine (2018 I'd say). Aside from battery life, which is somewhat lesser, all in all the mac is a much, much better machine than the HP, especially for "creature comforts": gorgeous screen, no misaligned panels rubbing against my wrists, great trackpad, no random coil whine, inaudible fans unless it starts compiling for a while, no background noise on the headphone out, integrated optical output when I want to use my home stereo.
- inDigiNeous 6y ago
  Still using a mid-2014 Macbook Pro with 16 gigs of ram and a 2.5 GHz quad-core i7 as my daily driver. Everything performs just fine to me, and macOS has even got faster during this time I've used the laptop, which is something to give credit to Apple for. I use mainly VSCode these days though and Firefox, but even Unity game engine works just fine on this machine. Any IDE I also throw at this machine works just fine. Only things that feel slow, are things that need a beefy GPU.
Hamuko 6y ago
My early 2011 MacBook Pro definitely isn't fast but it's usable for checking out a couple tabs worth of stuff on the sofa. My work 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro actually doesn't feel that fast considering how fucking expensive it is.
- tandr 6y ago
  My fully-loaded 2019 16-inch MacBook feels VERY underpowered actually - once you try to use all the cores (multiple compilation threads, parallel tests with multiple docker images running), it goes into what I would call a "heat shock". I suspect throttling kicks in and cpu charts in Activity Monitor become close-to-death flatlines. Oh, and the fan noise becomes non-ignorable too.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Yeah, full utilization leads to throttling, guaranteed. Although apparently it can get much worse than what I've had, down to like 1.0 Ghz. I've also had issues with the laptop waking from sleep, where it'd either hang for up to minutes, or just outright kernel panic. Big Sur seems to have fixed the kernel panics but waking from sleep still feels really slow.
- knolan 6y ago
  My 16” had two speeds. Quiet and cool with about 11 hours of battery life when writing, reading or some simple productivity stuff. Fast but loud and hot when doing anything else with about 3 hours of battery life. Even the Touch Bar (which I don’t hate, but I also don’t love) is uncomfortable to the touch. It seems there is no in between. I’m generally happy with the machine, but I’m very interested in what’s next for the big MBP.
- Klonoar 6y ago
  You know, I believe you on the 2019 - I've heard this from more people than I care to admit, and makes me glad I skipped that year. I think from 2016-2019 was a rough era for the MacBook Pro when you factor in price for performance; still great machines, but they didn't feel as polished as the 2015 MBP or the 2020 M1's. Edit: year banding.
Toutouxc 6y ago
My old 2013 is still a charming little machine. I made my GF "upgrade" to it from a random ~2017 HP plasticbook and she loves the thing. 4 GB of RAM can still fly if you only run native apps.
inDigiNeous 6y ago
This idea that Electron apps are inherently somehow slow is starting to bug me out. While writing Electron version of our graphics heavy web application, I noticed that the memory usage or CPU consumption is not a lot higher than some other native applications. We have taken careful care in order to write fast and memory friendly javascript if possible, avoiding using slow features of the language (the list is long, but things like forEach loops, ineffecient data structures etc) and taking care to profile and optimize. Result is an application that feels almost as fast as native and doesn't really consume so much memory even, although we are doing canvas based graphics realtime. My suspection is that many web-developers (and thus, qualified to developer for Electron) just don't have the tenacity or background to write efficient code. You can write slow-ass molasses javascript code very easily. Just take somebody who has done webdev for maybe like 2 - 3 years and doesn't have any other deeper CS background. Watch what kind of memory inefficient and slow code structures, especially with javascript where you don't really understand how heavy an operation like map() can be in worse cases, or where you are creating copies of your data multiple times for example, and voila, you have a slow-ass memory-hogging electron application. Maybe I should do a blog post about how our Electron -application is performing just to show people that you can write fast code using javascript also. But it takes skill and time, and maybe in this current day what matters is just cranking out builds that work somehow.
- heipei 6y ago
  I'm a self-taught JavaScript developer (front- and back-end) and I would love to read such a blog post. I mostly use language features for their expressiveness (map, filter, forEach) and rarely think about their performance implication unless there is reason to believe some piece of code is in a performance-critical path. However with a guide I might reconsider some scenarios where I'd be willing to give up expressiveness for performance.
  - greggman3 6y ago
    A blog post would be nice. You can also test https://jsbenchit.org/?src=708dfb8b9bbfe885f5495f74179fdb72 https://jsbenchit.org/?src=708dfb8b9bbfe885f5495f74179fdb72 https://jsbenchit.org/?src=f0fd4a14ff9a7049d88f57e0fd45b865 https://jsbenchit.org/?src=f0fd4a14ff9a7049d88f57e0fd45b865
taysondev 6y ago
I actually used a MacBook Air 2011 up until summer 2020 as my main home computer. The only reason I even bought a new MacBook was because I couldn't get the newest version of macOS which I needed for the latest version of Xcode. Finally sold the 2011 MacBook Air a few months ago for $300. I got so much value out of that laptop.
Angostura 6y ago
This late 2012 iMac is still my main machine (with a new big SSD). Oher than for gaming and Adobe Premier, it is perfectly happy with what I throw at it.

coliveira 6y ago

Exactly, I have a 2015 MacBook that works perfectly, unless I try to use electron-based apps.

mrweasel 6y ago

You can even go back to 2013 and not notice that you’re using a 7-8 year old machine. A MacBook Pro from late 2013 runs Big Sur and performs fine for most everyday use use case and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE. You just can’t run Chrome all the well, which should tell you more about Chrome than Macs.

hugi 6y ago
I do all my work (java/postgres etc) on a 2012 i7 Mac Mini. It used to be my home media server but I started using it as a "temporary machine" last year after killing my 2018 15" MBP by spilling water over it. I was planning to replace it with an Apple Silicon machine once they became available, but it's performing so well I'm more than happy to keep using it while waiting for a 15" or 16" M1x/M2. Amazing little machines.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
> and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE Probably depends on the IDE and the language. My impression is that newer computers (especially in the "consumer" / "general public" market) have especially improved efficiency. They're not much faster, but they last longer on smaller batteries. My late 2013 15" (2.3 GHz / 16 GB RAM) works great with Pycharm for moderately sized projects. It's even usable for personal Rust projects (with the intellij-rust plugin). For Rust it's somewhat slower than my i5-8500 desktop but not by much. For incremental compiles, I don't feel like I'm waiting around more. The i5 mainly wins when it can use all six cores. It's however quite a bit faster than my work HP ProBook with an i5-8250U which is a much newer machine (2018 I'd say). Aside from battery life, which is somewhat lesser, all in all the mac is a much, much better machine than the HP, especially for "creature comforts": gorgeous screen, no misaligned panels rubbing against my wrists, great trackpad, no random coil whine, inaudible fans unless it starts compiling for a while, no background noise on the headphone out, integrated optical output when I want to use my home stereo.
inDigiNeous 6y ago
Still using a mid-2014 Macbook Pro with 16 gigs of ram and a 2.5 GHz quad-core i7 as my daily driver. Everything performs just fine to me, and macOS has even got faster during this time I've used the laptop, which is something to give credit to Apple for. I use mainly VSCode these days though and Firefox, but even Unity game engine works just fine on this machine. Any IDE I also throw at this machine works just fine. Only things that feel slow, are things that need a beefy GPU.

Hamuko 6y ago

My early 2011 MacBook Pro definitely isn't fast but it's usable for checking out a couple tabs worth of stuff on the sofa. My work 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro actually doesn't feel that fast considering how fucking expensive it is.

tandr 6y ago
My fully-loaded 2019 16-inch MacBook feels VERY underpowered actually - once you try to use all the cores (multiple compilation threads, parallel tests with multiple docker images running), it goes into what I would call a "heat shock". I suspect throttling kicks in and cpu charts in Activity Monitor become close-to-death flatlines. Oh, and the fan noise becomes non-ignorable too.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Yeah, full utilization leads to throttling, guaranteed. Although apparently it can get much worse than what I've had, down to like 1.0 Ghz. I've also had issues with the laptop waking from sleep, where it'd either hang for up to minutes, or just outright kernel panic. Big Sur seems to have fixed the kernel panics but waking from sleep still feels really slow.
knolan 6y ago
My 16” had two speeds. Quiet and cool with about 11 hours of battery life when writing, reading or some simple productivity stuff. Fast but loud and hot when doing anything else with about 3 hours of battery life. Even the Touch Bar (which I don’t hate, but I also don’t love) is uncomfortable to the touch. It seems there is no in between. I’m generally happy with the machine, but I’m very interested in what’s next for the big MBP.
Klonoar 6y ago
You know, I believe you on the 2019 - I've heard this from more people than I care to admit, and makes me glad I skipped that year. I think from 2016-2019 was a rough era for the MacBook Pro when you factor in price for performance; still great machines, but they didn't feel as polished as the 2015 MBP or the 2020 M1's. Edit: year banding.

Toutouxc 6y ago

My old 2013 is still a charming little machine. I made my GF "upgrade" to it from a random ~2017 HP plasticbook and she loves the thing. 4 GB of RAM can still fly if you only run native apps.

inDigiNeous 6y ago

This idea that Electron apps are inherently somehow slow is starting to bug me out. While writing Electron version of our graphics heavy web application, I noticed that the memory usage or CPU consumption is not a lot higher than some other native applications. We have taken careful care in order to write fast and memory friendly javascript if possible, avoiding using slow features of the language (the list is long, but things like forEach loops, ineffecient data structures etc) and taking care to profile and optimize. Result is an application that feels almost as fast as native and doesn't really consume so much memory even, although we are doing canvas based graphics realtime. My suspection is that many web-developers (and thus, qualified to developer for Electron) just don't have the tenacity or background to write efficient code. You can write slow-ass molasses javascript code very easily. Just take somebody who has done webdev for maybe like 2 - 3 years and doesn't have any other deeper CS background. Watch what kind of memory inefficient and slow code structures, especially with javascript where you don't really understand how heavy an operation like map() can be in worse cases, or where you are creating copies of your data multiple times for example, and voila, you have a slow-ass memory-hogging electron application. Maybe I should do a blog post about how our Electron -application is performing just to show people that you can write fast code using javascript also. But it takes skill and time, and maybe in this current day what matters is just cranking out builds that work somehow.

heipei 6y ago
I'm a self-taught JavaScript developer (front- and back-end) and I would love to read such a blog post. I mostly use language features for their expressiveness (map, filter, forEach) and rarely think about their performance implication unless there is reason to believe some piece of code is in a performance-critical path. However with a guide I might reconsider some scenarios where I'd be willing to give up expressiveness for performance.
- greggman3 6y ago
  A blog post would be nice. You can also test https://jsbenchit.org/?src=708dfb8b9bbfe885f5495f74179fdb72 https://jsbenchit.org/?src=708dfb8b9bbfe885f5495f74179fdb72 https://jsbenchit.org/?src=f0fd4a14ff9a7049d88f57e0fd45b865 https://jsbenchit.org/?src=f0fd4a14ff9a7049d88f57e0fd45b865

taysondev 6y ago

I actually used a MacBook Air 2011 up until summer 2020 as my main home computer. The only reason I even bought a new MacBook was because I couldn't get the newest version of macOS which I needed for the latest version of Xcode. Finally sold the 2011 MacBook Air a few months ago for $300. I got so much value out of that laptop.

Angostura 6y ago

This late 2012 iMac is still my main machine (with a new big SSD). Oher than for gaming and Adobe Premier, it is perfectly happy with what I throw at it.