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I had the option of taking an M1 MBP for work, but the M1 MBP only supports a single external display and a laughable (in 2021) 16GB of RAM, so I consider it ba

I had the option of taking an M1 MBP for work, but the M1 MBP only supports a single external display and a laughable (in 2021) 16GB of RAM, so I consider it basically unusable. It certainly feels rushed, if the next generation supports multiple displays and 32+GB RAM then it might be a decent development machine? Linux (with an LTS release) just works, to the point where it is almost boring - which is a good thing for a work machine. OSX on the other hand would frequently break things to the point where I feared software updates. The Catalina upgrade for example killed my install and I had to format my drive.

josephg 5y ago
Just for reference, the current M1 air and pro are positioned as replacements for Apple’s bottom of the line computers, which had 16 gigs of ram max and 2 thunderbolt ports before as well. If you need 32 gigs of ram then, well, I don't think the problem is the M1 mac was rushed out the door. You have the opposite problem - which is that they haven't released an ARM variant of the machine that you need yet. It sounds like they’ll release some higher tier models later in the year. I'm hoping for multiple external monitor support and eGPU support too! Sorry for singling you out with this rant, but personally I think more development needs to be done on lower specced computers for user empathy. Too much software is written to run on the expensive computers software engineers buy, but struggles on the computers regular people own. 16 gigs isn't "crazy" in 2021 - the median computer doesn't have 32 gigs of ram, or 16 gigs of ram. If you wander through a Best Buy some time, take a look at what they sell. 4-8 gigs is the norm. We should be developing our software accordingly. (And I’m as guilty of this as everyone else. I ripped out some beautiful css transitions I’d made a few years ago from a client webpage because they couldn’t play smoothly on the computers of our users.)

josephg 5y ago

Just for reference, the current M1 air and pro are positioned as replacements for Apple’s bottom of the line computers, which had 16 gigs of ram max and 2 thunderbolt ports before as well. If you need 32 gigs of ram then, well, I don't think the problem is the M1 mac was rushed out the door. You have the opposite problem - which is that they haven't released an ARM variant of the machine that you need yet. It sounds like they’ll release some higher tier models later in the year. I'm hoping for multiple external monitor support and eGPU support too! Sorry for singling you out with this rant, but personally I think more development needs to be done on lower specced computers for user empathy. Too much software is written to run on the expensive computers software engineers buy, but struggles on the computers regular people own. 16 gigs isn't "crazy" in 2021 - the median computer doesn't have 32 gigs of ram, or 16 gigs of ram. If you wander through a Best Buy some time, take a look at what they sell. 4-8 gigs is the norm. We should be developing our software accordingly. (And I’m as guilty of this as everyone else. I ripped out some beautiful css transitions I’d made a few years ago from a client webpage because they couldn’t play smoothly on the computers of our users.)