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This just proves the parent commenter right. 'Software developers often have to run...' - yes! That is the problem! People shouldn't have to run all of that, bu

This just proves the parent commenter right. 'Software developers often have to run...' - yes! That is the problem! People shouldn't have to run all of that, but they do. If people thought about what they really needed rather than just buying more hardware, the world would be a better place. (Also, I doubt you need hundreds of chrome tabs + heavy IDEs, a couple of tabs + <insert lightweight editor of choice> works just fine)

scoopertrooper 5y ago
I'm so glad there are people like you to tell me the best way to do my job without even knowing what I do - it must be a real skill. Yes, it would be possible to curate my tabs better, but I often have quite a few things on the boil at any one time and taking time out to carefully prune my tabs holds up delivery. I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I managed to survive, but context switching became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious productivity drain. It turns out that the heavy IDE is heavy for a reason, it provides useful capabilities! The kind of capabilities one needs as a professional software developer. When one is working on a foreign code base spanning thousands of files, it's genuinely handy to have some tooling to help you find your way around. VS Code tries, but it's generally pretty useless in my experience.
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I managed to survive, but context switching became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious productivity drain. A friend recommended I try such a RAM diet, so I went from 64Gb to a 4Gb laptop. Unlike you, I've found it helped me focus. So I've kept this laptop as a "productivity" laptop - when I work on a tight deadline, I use it, because there will be 0 risk of context switching :)
  - webmobdev 5y ago
    This is such a typical Apple fanboi type response - you are the one using it wrong.
    - csdvrx 5y ago
      Dude, I'm a Windows fangirl...
  - antifa 5y ago
    I think what you found helpful was the ability to pause a session, then return to it later. I think the ability to do this without buying a second laptop would be very useful.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  It’s not for everybody, but for helping manage tab overload the tab groups added to Safari in Monterey have been a massive boon for me. At least in my case most tabs fit fairly well into one of ten or so groups, and so management is as simple as switching my main Safari window to the group relevant at that point in time. The unused groups are slept after a certain period of inactivity, which means that most of the time Safari is only consuming the resources required by a single set of tabs. It’s pretty nice.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    I had an auto-discarder plugin for Chrome to a similar effect. I also tried switching to Firefox, which also improved matters somewhat. I don't think I'd have survived at all with a 8GB device at all otherwise! However, doing something as basic as loading up a large Java project (like Kafka) in Intellij would cause the the laptop to die a horrible death when it tried to resolve the Maven dependencies.
- horns4lyfe 5y ago
  There’s no way having hundreds of chrome tabs open is actually beneficial to you.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Okay from a data analysis / data scientist perspective how do I load into memory my ~60GB dataset into memory for analysis. Also, swapping to disk will waste my time.
- areoform 5y ago
  The storage read speed for the M1 is ~3.4 GB/s. The write speed is 2.8GB/s. Unless you are looking at all of your 60GB dataset in one go, clearly the speed at which storage can be accessed is fast enough to do batch processing on the data fairly seamlessly. Even at 2GB/s that's your entire dataset in 30s. https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/12/how-fast-is-the-ssd-inside-an-m1-mac/ https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/12/how-fast-is-the-ssd-insi...
  - zitterbewegung 5y ago
    Disk speed on the MacBook Pro 2021's are ~7-8GB/s on the M1 Pro / Max so those are still faster which improves my ability to swap out even large amounts of data above 64GB.
    - SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
      I own two fully spec’d M1 Max MacBook Pros (8TB SSD). I find it hard to believe that anyone is getting 8GB/s read or writes to disk. Both of mine consistently write at a maximum of ~7.3GB/s and read at a maximum of ~5.7GB/s. The M1 Max is a monster, and either of mine easily outperforms any other computer I have ever used, but I don’t think it’s capable of 8GB/s reads or writes to disk.
_ea1k 5y ago
Why should an Android developer not "have to" run an Android emulator?
- hulitu 5y ago
  > Why should an Android developer not "have to" run an Android emulator? Why should ? We don't run PC emulators or MacOsX emulators to develop SW. Only Android and iOS are not able to function as real OSs.
  - _ea1k 5y ago
    We actually do run those emulators (or at least virtualization) when developing across platforms. With root, Android could even make a decent host platform for doing development, but that doesn't obviate the need for emulators and virtualization systems.
Msw242 5y ago
How do you test builds that work across multiple services locally without using a ton of ram? What do you do for a living?
Salgat 5y ago
Or I can just do whatever is most productive for my workflow and not have to worry about RAM, not worry about managing tabs, not worry about what windows I left open that I might or might not need later, worry about the ram consumption of different apps I want to use, etc, that's also an option. Dunno why you're making it such a huge deal, convenience and productivity are after all the goal.

scoopertrooper 5y ago

I'm so glad there are people like you to tell me the best way to do my job without even knowing what I do - it must be a real skill. Yes, it would be possible to curate my tabs better, but I often have quite a few things on the boil at any one time and taking time out to carefully prune my tabs holds up delivery. I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I managed to survive, but context switching became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious productivity drain. It turns out that the heavy IDE is heavy for a reason, it provides useful capabilities! The kind of capabilities one needs as a professional software developer. When one is working on a foreign code base spanning thousands of files, it's genuinely handy to have some tooling to help you find your way around. VS Code tries, but it's generally pretty useless in my experience.

csdvrx 5y ago
> I actually tried to subsist on a 8GB M1 for a few months, I managed to survive, but context switching became painfully slow as I'd have to shut down large parts of my tool chain and carefully prune off browser tabs. It was a serious productivity drain. A friend recommended I try such a RAM diet, so I went from 64Gb to a 4Gb laptop. Unlike you, I've found it helped me focus. So I've kept this laptop as a "productivity" laptop - when I work on a tight deadline, I use it, because there will be 0 risk of context switching :)
- webmobdev 5y ago
  This is such a typical Apple fanboi type response - you are the one using it wrong.
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    Dude, I'm a Windows fangirl...
- antifa 5y ago
  I think what you found helpful was the ability to pause a session, then return to it later. I think the ability to do this without buying a second laptop would be very useful.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
It’s not for everybody, but for helping manage tab overload the tab groups added to Safari in Monterey have been a massive boon for me. At least in my case most tabs fit fairly well into one of ten or so groups, and so management is as simple as switching my main Safari window to the group relevant at that point in time. The unused groups are slept after a certain period of inactivity, which means that most of the time Safari is only consuming the resources required by a single set of tabs. It’s pretty nice.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  I had an auto-discarder plugin for Chrome to a similar effect. I also tried switching to Firefox, which also improved matters somewhat. I don't think I'd have survived at all with a 8GB device at all otherwise! However, doing something as basic as loading up a large Java project (like Kafka) in Intellij would cause the the laptop to die a horrible death when it tried to resolve the Maven dependencies.
horns4lyfe 5y ago
There’s no way having hundreds of chrome tabs open is actually beneficial to you.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Okay from a data analysis / data scientist perspective how do I load into memory my ~60GB dataset into memory for analysis. Also, swapping to disk will waste my time.

areoform 5y ago
The storage read speed for the M1 is ~3.4 GB/s. The write speed is 2.8GB/s. Unless you are looking at all of your 60GB dataset in one go, clearly the speed at which storage can be accessed is fast enough to do batch processing on the data fairly seamlessly. Even at 2GB/s that's your entire dataset in 30s. https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/12/how-fast-is-the-ssd-inside-an-m1-mac/ https://eclecticlight.co/2020/12/12/how-fast-is-the-ssd-insi...
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  Disk speed on the MacBook Pro 2021's are ~7-8GB/s on the M1 Pro / Max so those are still faster which improves my ability to swap out even large amounts of data above 64GB.
  - SpelingBeeChamp 5y ago
    I own two fully spec’d M1 Max MacBook Pros (8TB SSD). I find it hard to believe that anyone is getting 8GB/s read or writes to disk. Both of mine consistently write at a maximum of ~7.3GB/s and read at a maximum of ~5.7GB/s. The M1 Max is a monster, and either of mine easily outperforms any other computer I have ever used, but I don’t think it’s capable of 8GB/s reads or writes to disk.

_ea1k 5y ago

Why should an Android developer not "have to" run an Android emulator?

hulitu 5y ago
> Why should an Android developer not "have to" run an Android emulator? Why should ? We don't run PC emulators or MacOsX emulators to develop SW. Only Android and iOS are not able to function as real OSs.
- _ea1k 5y ago
  We actually do run those emulators (or at least virtualization) when developing across platforms. With root, Android could even make a decent host platform for doing development, but that doesn't obviate the need for emulators and virtualization systems.

Msw242 5y ago

How do you test builds that work across multiple services locally without using a ton of ram? What do you do for a living?

Salgat 5y ago

Or I can just do whatever is most productive for my workflow and not have to worry about RAM, not worry about managing tabs, not worry about what windows I left open that I might or might not need later, worry about the ram consumption of different apps I want to use, etc, that's also an option. Dunno why you're making it such a huge deal, convenience and productivity are after all the goal.