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My 2017 MBP is getting very tired now, and after getting a taste of what a real machine is capable of since working from home, I've realised how much time I've

My 2017 MBP is getting very tired now, and after getting a taste of what a real machine is capable of since working from home, I've realised how much time I've wasted waiting for builds and whatnot. The laptop form factor doesn't do anything for me any more either, and I want to jump straight onto a Mini or Studio (who's price is similar to what my MBP originally cost), but I feel like it's a blind jump without knowing if all my development tools are going to work. Apple's relationship with backwards compatibility has always been poor, and Catalina's 32bit removal - even though I delayed by update for a year - still hurt. Tools that I used wouldn't get 64bit updates for another few months. I am concerned that Rosetta won't be around forever, and I use tools today that one might regard as abandonware - they'll never get arm64 versions. I do sometimes use and Linux and Windows VM's as well, VirtualBox doesn't support M1 yet and Apple have some new poorly supported virtualisation framework So, for anyone in a similar situation: 1) What kind of codgy old tools do/don't work? 2) What VM software do you use? Does it have USB passthrough? How does it compare with VirtualBox's more advanced features?

lmarcos 5y ago
I was in a more or less similar situation (old 2015 MBP). My main concern with the new Macs were mainly: can I run ubuntu VMs via vagrant? I bought the M1 pro (32GB ram). So far, so good. I'm using Vmware fusion (tech preview) which is free, Vagrant and the vmware plugin (which Hashicorp released for free as well). You can use any of the Vagrant arm boxes available on Vagrantcloud, or if you are like me and don't trust random people's boxes, built your own Vagrant box using, for instance Packer (search on github). I have to say, though, that my requirements regarding VMs are not that advanced (I just want to be able to spin up N VMs, all with custom ip addresses and to mount volumes from the host so that I can write code in my Mac, but execute it in the guest). Edit: performance-wise, the M1 pro is awesome. I'm running 6 Ubuntu VMs, tons of tabs in Safari and Chrome, a couple of Jetbrains IDEs, iterm, YouTube videos, PDfs open, even OpenEmu with a psx game... And the laptop (the 16 inch version) is still cold on touch and I cannot hear the fans.

lmarcos 5y ago

I was in a more or less similar situation (old 2015 MBP). My main concern with the new Macs were mainly: can I run ubuntu VMs via vagrant? I bought the M1 pro (32GB ram). So far, so good. I'm using Vmware fusion (tech preview) which is free, Vagrant and the vmware plugin (which Hashicorp released for free as well). You can use any of the Vagrant arm boxes available on Vagrantcloud, or if you are like me and don't trust random people's boxes, built your own Vagrant box using, for instance Packer (search on github). I have to say, though, that my requirements regarding VMs are not that advanced (I just want to be able to spin up N VMs, all with custom ip addresses and to mount volumes from the host so that I can write code in my Mac, but execute it in the guest). Edit: performance-wise, the M1 pro is awesome. I'm running 6 Ubuntu VMs, tons of tabs in Safari and Chrome, a couple of Jetbrains IDEs, iterm, YouTube videos, PDfs open, even OpenEmu with a psx game... And the laptop (the 16 inch version) is still cold on touch and I cannot hear the fans.