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I have done this. During the pandemic I switched jobs and got a new MacBook Pro... it failed, then it failed again, and again. I sent it back a few times and e

• bitwize 5y ago
  The M1 MBP is a new class of machine. Rock solid, faster than just about any other laptop, insane battery life, immune to the thermal issues that plagued Intel MBPs. It could probably easily replace that desktop you built with power to spare.
  • MathCodeLove 5y ago
    I can say the same about the M1 Mac Mini and its much cheaper
    • cpach 5y ago
      Indeed. AFAICT it’s a damn fine computer.
    • eitland 5y ago
      I have one. I am not impressed. At all. (In all fairness, I have the smallest one, but still.)
      • cpach 5y ago
        What was it that you didn’t like about it?
        • eitland 5y ago
          If kids have logged in it becomes slow even after they are all logged out. Not faster than my > 3 year old linux laptop.
      • bitwize 5y ago
        Try ARM-native apps. Night and day difference. Seriously.
      • MathCodeLove 5y ago
        Mine is the smallest one and I love it.
  • hobs 5y ago
    Honestly I see no reason to invest in Apple if they are fine with 5 years of shitty laptops.
    • emteycz 5y ago
      One reason would be that you don't like shitty laptops. Any other laptop (I tried top end Dells, Lenovos and Asuses) are much worse in all things considered. Even the 2016-2021 MBPs were at best comparable to models of these other brands, never worse. Do you not like fans when you Google Meet? How about fans when you look at your desktop or start your computer?
      • grumpyprole 5y ago
        > Even the 2016-2021 MBPs were at best comparable to models of these other brands, never worse. This is patently false. The butterfly keyboards were a disaster for Apple. Financial reports suggest it may have cost Apple an additional billion dollars per-year in warranty repairs. The M1 machines are nice and Apple seemed to have fixed their reliability issues; but your post is essentially, at best, a cover up.
        • emteycz 5y ago
          So what? It was still the better keyboard. I had it for two years. Much better than anything Dell or Lenovo or any other brand I've ever seen had. Yeah, it had issues, but it never had the issues my Lenovo and Dell laptops had - like keys literally falling off, for example. Two keys on one of my Lenovo machines were broken from the factory. The Dell i9 machine had a key that was attached only on one side and they refused to fix it.
          • grumpyprole 5y ago
            You think Apple's Butterfly keyboard was better than a Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard? That certainly would be a minority opinion. I can't comment on cheaper Dell and Lenovo machines, but that wouldn't really be a fair comparison.
  • StillBored 5y ago
    As someone with both an M1 and various intel and AMD machines. The M1 tends to outclass most laptops (primary in single thread based workloads) but they are well down the ladder of performance in comparison to what is possible to put in a desktop form factor. The mac studio seems to take a nice bite out of those options as well, but its not a laptop either, and depending on workload its quite likely still loses pretty bad if the desktop is tuned to the workload (aka toss a couple 3090's in, or a threadripper/etc for massively parallel stuff, or faster disks, etc). People who are stuck in the laptop mindset, seem to forget that desktops have a lot of add in card/etc flexibility for workload tuning. Need a 100Gbit network card, just plug it in, need 2T ram pick a motherboard with support/etc. Think about what this (somewhat randomly picked) motherboard can do, that you can't get from an apple device. https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/Workstation/Pro-WS-WRX80E-SAGE-SE-WIFI/ https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards...
    • giraffe_lady 5y ago
      I never need any of that though, or any additional performance. I need to have about twenty browser tabs and a few electron apps open. If it can handle that smoothly without painful latency we're good. I don't forget what desktops can do I just don't care and would rather be able to work from the couch when I feel like it.
    • moonchrome 5y ago
      I think people who use 2T ram in workstations and people who work on laptops are not really overlapping much. I've built a 5900x with 64GB high speed ram, 2x NVME 4.0 because my 2018 i9 Macbook pro was hot garbage and would crawl when working on a project with a bunch of docker microservices. I regret this decision now because the new M1 MBP would do everything I need and I wouldn't have to worry about SSH workflows, keeping my PC/internet up while I'm away/traveling, having to work on two separate devices and migrate over all the time, two keyboard layouts (Mac/PC). I think OP is right that M1 MBP really changed the equation for most "regular" developers, before the M1 MBP my choice was the only sane option because all the laptops available had huge drawbacks (Intel was and is hot garbage, AMD laptops are budget tier/gaming bricks).
  • Ourgon 5y ago
    > with power to spare ...but without money to spare. If the desktop fits his needs there is nothing gained in replacing it with a proprietary and form-factor limited device like an Apple laptop unless he's hog-tied to the Apple world - which does not seem to be the case here. I use a bunch of devices, some portable, some not. When I need something portable I take, let's say, a T42p running Linux. I'm typing this from a resurrected iMac 27" running Linux which sits next to a Compaq 6910p in a docking station connected to a 24" monitor. The iMac is the newest device at 12 years, that T42p is 17 years old yet it still works fine for most things as long as I can reach the server-under-the-stairs. Sure, that M1 makes for faster media consumption but... that is not what I use these things for. I also foresee a not-so-distant future where that M1 lies in a cupboard due to some malfunction - bad battery being the most likely - which is deemed too expensive to repair while most of those old devices around here still continue to work.
  • nicoco 5y ago
    Let me jump on this opportunity to give a little unpopular opinion on the M1 MBP, after 1 year of using one (being completely new to apple), since most (all?) of the comments I have seen here are dithyrambic. Granted, the hardware is great. Silence, good perf, no heating, amazing battery life. I love this. The software part has not been that smooth for me: - I use the python scientific stack, and it's not there yet. This will probably improve in the future, but for now, I'm stuck using rosetta stone and well the perf is not as good as it should be. - I thought the stability of Mac OS X would amaze me. It did not. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely OK and I did not lose any work. But I have had to 'hard poweroff' the thing quite a few times. - As a long time debian user, and for what I do (ML, image processing, simulations), linux is just less hassle in my opinion. Homebrew helps, yes, but feels so 'second-class' compared to [your favorite distro] package manager.
    • JasonFruit 5y ago
      > dithyrambic I pride myself on knowing words, and I did not know this word. Thanks!
      • tromp 5y ago
        According to Merriam-Webster: a statement or writing in an exalted or enthusiastic vein
        • Wistar 5y ago
          Great word and apparently an old one: Webster's 1913 Dictionary: • Dith`yram"bic (?), a. [L. dithyrambicus, Gr. ?: cf. F. dithyrambique.] Pertaining to, or resembling, a dithyramb; wild and boisterous. "Dithyrambic sallies." Longfellow. -- n. A dithyrambic poem; a dithyramb. • Dith"yramb (?), n. [L. dithyrambus, Gr. ? a kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus; also, a name of Bacchus; of unknown origin: cf. F. dithyrambe.] A kind of lyric poetry in honor of Bacchus, usually sung by a band of revelers to a flute accompaniment; hence, in general, a poem written in a wild irregular strain. Bentley.
    • mbreese 5y ago
  • maccard 5y ago
    > It could probably easily replace that desktop you built with power to spare. Not even close. A 5950x will absolutely smoke an M1 max on a multithreaded workload, and if your workload needs more than 64GB ram the difference is even starker.
    • carterschonwald 5y ago
      I’ve that cpu and 64gb of ecc. It’s so stable. Can even play games when I’m no doing compiling! Or at the same time!
  • klabb3 5y ago
    Same with the M1 Air. First time I've ever considered an air. I really like the idea of not having a fan: - No dust can get in because it's sealed. - Mechanical parts break more often. - I often block the vents anyway because I'm sitting in bed or something. However, it's not all green grass. Non-replacable SSD and RAM is horrible, horrible practice. I root for the competition / right-to-repair advocates to force apple into fixing this. I usually perform a major upgrade on desktops & laptops after ~4 years.
    • opan 5y ago
      This is ARM now. Look at any SBC out there and you'll see soldered RAM.
    • bitwize 5y ago
      No! Apple's integrated design has huge advantages. Then performance ceiling of RAM built on-chip, for instance, is much higher (because light can only go so fast) than even soldered-on discrete RAM chips, which in turn are potentially higher performance than DIMMs. One of the reasons why the M1 is so blistering fast is this integrated RAM design; it's like having 8-64 GiB of L3 cache. The same goes for SSDs; by building the SSD controller into the CPU, you can get I/O performance that vastly outperforms even PCI NVMe drives. Over the next few years, it will be the case that the most powerful computer you can buy will be a Mac. The M1 series Macs signal a return to the Amiga days, when thoughtful engineers designed the whole system with integrated hardware and software for speed and responsiveness that cannot be matched or surpassed by the cobbled together PC ecosystem that has dominated for so long.
      • klabb3 5y ago
        Is it possible that the entire integrated chip can be replaced? Even if at a higher cost, it's better than throwing the whole computer away.
      • tzs 5y ago
        The SSD controller is on chip in the M1 family, but the actual SSD controlled by that controller can still be removable. The Mac Studio proves that. The actual storage is on a removable card in a socket. I don’t think Apple has said why they did it this way in the Studio. I’ve heard three theories. 1. They plan to at some point support upgrading storage. 2. It is so failing SSDs can be replaced instead of having to do a whole logic board swap. 3. It is for easier and cheaper inventory management. It is easier for them to build most of them with the most popular storage configuration or two and then when someone orders a less popular configuration change the SSDs than to build ahead of time and stock the less popular configurations.
  • lacker 5y ago
    If only the M1s were compatible with CUDA....
  • brimble 5y ago
    It seems like chronic problems with laptops are often the fault of Nvidia or AMD discrete video cards. Even for Macs. Once I started avoiding non-integrated graphics in laptops, things got a lot smoother.
• dijit 5y ago
  I have the exact same experience, the 2020 intel macbook pro was annoying enough that I genuinely went back to linux on the desktop. Loud, hot, sluggish. Now everything is snappy and smooth. Low regrets.
• me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
  I wish I could do this but I build mobile apps in addition to any backend stuff. Kinda need to be on an apple for making iOS apps.
  • spicybright 5y ago
    I know I'm just whining, but it's ridiculous this is still the case.
    • tehbeard 5y ago
      There's £2k+ worth of compute on my office desk, the size of a thick book that I haven't touched in years... All because Apple deems it the only way to run xcode... At least the client paid for the machine (enterprise, this was their way of having reproducable builds... Until the pandemic but a halt to their project)
      • spicybright 5y ago
        Yeah, it certainly hurts a bit less if you're not the one paying for it. I know we're in a high income profession, but buying another $2.5k+ laptop just for iphone development isn't a trivial expense if you do contracting (especially if you're not working 40 hours a week).
  • SomeCallMeTim 5y ago
    I do all of my mobile development cross-platform. 99% of the app dev happens on Android, and I just test on iOS when I need to--and for that I have an older, cheap, MacMini.
    • me_me_mu_mu 5y ago
      For your case sure, you only deal with iOS 1% of the time. For me it is 50%.
      • SomeCallMeTim 5y ago
• christkv 5y ago
  I have my old Intel® Core™ i7-5820K desktop with 32GB ram and a vega 54 running ubuntu and it's my main driver when working from home. Still does pretty much everything I need.
  • paulmd 5y ago
    X99 is a great "tinkerers" platform before stuff really got locked down. You've got tons of PCIe, quad-channel RAM, dirt-cheap xeons with decent core count (some of them are even multiplier-unlocked), and some X99 boards support RDIMM and LRDIMM. It may seem odd to say that you want both RDIMM/LRDIMM and overclocking but many of the server processors run at very low speeds compared to gaming systems, often 2.0-2.4 GHz or so, and just running at a modest 4 GHz or so on all 8 cores is easily achievable on X99 if the chip is multiplier-unlocked. Epyc is still better, you can achieve similar performance with much higher core counts, but you can get X99 chips and decent boards for a song, while (eg) Epyc 7402P is still almost a $1500 chip with $600+ boards for it. The one downside to X99 is that the System Agent is just not very mature compared to later iterations. Even 3000 speed RAM often requires a "BCLK strap" which is like a special multiplier just for the System Agent. This is often set automatically when you enable XMP, usually a 1.25x multiplier, but this can cause some problems with some PCIe and NVMe devices which don't maintain their own clocks. I haven't run into major problems with consumer-tier hardware but YMMV and "dumb" devices like IO Fusion cards might have more issues. I am thinking seriously about getting 8x32GB 2133 LRDIMM and using that as big NAS for homelab stuff, then transitioning to an Epyc 7402P at some future date, then upgrading RAM to something higher clocked once it gets cheaper.
    • christkv 5y ago
      yeah mine runs at 3.9 Ghz stable without any major issues.