4 ms·

I don't really like Macs that much, so you can take what I say with that grain of salt if you already have a preference. Everything is noticeably laggier. I'm

I don't really like Macs that much, so you can take what I say with that grain of salt if you already have a preference. Everything is noticeably laggier. I'm not sure about the actual performance of long running computations, in any case there isn't enough of a performance difference there for me to casually notice. However, the whole OS UI just locks (you get the spinning pinwheel) multiple times per hour, and in many different programs. My wife likes to tease me that it is just be the corporate lock down software. Anyways, it is frequent enough to really be a, "Oh, here we go again," experience. Development experience. Mostly fine, I'm an IntelliJ user, and some unknown plugins cause lockup so we all just disable everything we aren't actively using. Docker compatibility seems unaffected. I guess this is because it was always a vm layer? We are no longer able to use some specific VM software but that didn't affect me in particular. We got the 32GB models. I have no complaints, this is what I run on my personal computer; mostly, just to have breathing room. For react native 16GB might be enough, I haven't done any react native so cannot say for sure; large scale java workloads are memory hogs. It is nice to have that breathing room though. The system is quieter, but I found the previous macs to be anomalously noisy (compared with my fan cooled personal computer) for comparable (CPU) work loads. Now I would say it is back to that level of quiet. People say the battery runs longer but I am not the sort of developer that spends a lot of time in meeting rooms with my PC. So, if you want a laptop, seems passable but I don't find it all that impressive myself. My personal preferences would lead me elsewhere (I have a cheap laptop for mobile activity and an extremely powerful desktop).

SyneRyder 4y ago
> Everything is noticeably laggier. Do you mean laggier than the Intel Macs? Do you just mean virtualization is laggier (would make sense with x86 emulation workloads), or that the whole macOS is laggier? Seems bizarre that an M1 could be laggier than Intel. Maybe it really is corporate lockdown software ruining it? (For context: ex-Apple fan here, but switched to Windows 4 years ago after an especially unreliable MBP. My Lenovo ThinkPad X1 is vastly more reliable than the Mac, but I still miss pre-Catalina Mac OS.)
garblegarble 4y ago
That sounds like there's something seriously wrong with your machine or network (either that or the 'corporate lockdown' joke isn't a joke...) I've found my M1 MBP much more responsive (especially under heavy load) than my Intel MBPs. I also use IntelliJ and find the latest 2022.2.1 release to be positively snappy
- BlackFly 4y ago
  Our monorepo is also enormous in regards to IntelliJ. I don't know why all the other UI elements lock up though, indeed I think the corporate lockdown problems are historically also what made the experience miserable on many windows machines that otherwise looked good on paper. Now that macs are showing up more in the corporate world, the red tape is catching up.
moistly 4y ago
How weird that your experience is so incongruent with everyone else’s reports. Do you think you got a dud machine, or do you think you’re running software that others aren’t, or otherwise using your machine differently than everyone else? There’s got to be a reason for your experience to be so different!
- BlackFly 4y ago
  Well certainly we have tracked down some issues (in the IDE) to being binary incompatibilities in plugins. So some of it was just downstream (of Apple) software not being ready. The machine isn't a dud as everyone on my team has a similar experience (although frontend developers don't seem as unhappy). With regards to java, out of curiosity I went and reran some JMH benchmarks we have and saw a ~15% decrease in ops/sec. So much of this could be related to the JVM not being well optimized for this particular architecture. That is something I would expect and will resolve itself in time as more engineering gets devoted to this architecture. All of my experience with the mac has always been incongruent with what other people casually would say. For me, it is just been another run of the mill OS; after all my experience, I very much prefer windows at home and linux for work, but none of them are perfect for me. So, it didn't surprise me that my experience was so different from what I had been hearing. I typically just expect that the things that I hear when I am not trying to scratch beneath the surface are more or less marketing.

SyneRyder 4y ago

> Everything is noticeably laggier. Do you mean laggier than the Intel Macs? Do you just mean virtualization is laggier (would make sense with x86 emulation workloads), or that the whole macOS is laggier? Seems bizarre that an M1 could be laggier than Intel. Maybe it really is corporate lockdown software ruining it? (For context: ex-Apple fan here, but switched to Windows 4 years ago after an especially unreliable MBP. My Lenovo ThinkPad X1 is vastly more reliable than the Mac, but I still miss pre-Catalina Mac OS.)

garblegarble 4y ago

That sounds like there's something seriously wrong with your machine or network (either that or the 'corporate lockdown' joke isn't a joke...) I've found my M1 MBP much more responsive (especially under heavy load) than my Intel MBPs. I also use IntelliJ and find the latest 2022.2.1 release to be positively snappy

BlackFly 4y ago
Our monorepo is also enormous in regards to IntelliJ. I don't know why all the other UI elements lock up though, indeed I think the corporate lockdown problems are historically also what made the experience miserable on many windows machines that otherwise looked good on paper. Now that macs are showing up more in the corporate world, the red tape is catching up.

moistly 4y ago

How weird that your experience is so incongruent with everyone else’s reports. Do you think you got a dud machine, or do you think you’re running software that others aren’t, or otherwise using your machine differently than everyone else? There’s got to be a reason for your experience to be so different!

BlackFly 4y ago
Well certainly we have tracked down some issues (in the IDE) to being binary incompatibilities in plugins. So some of it was just downstream (of Apple) software not being ready. The machine isn't a dud as everyone on my team has a similar experience (although frontend developers don't seem as unhappy). With regards to java, out of curiosity I went and reran some JMH benchmarks we have and saw a ~15% decrease in ops/sec. So much of this could be related to the JVM not being well optimized for this particular architecture. That is something I would expect and will resolve itself in time as more engineering gets devoted to this architecture. All of my experience with the mac has always been incongruent with what other people casually would say. For me, it is just been another run of the mill OS; after all my experience, I very much prefer windows at home and linux for work, but none of them are perfect for me. So, it didn't surprise me that my experience was so different from what I had been hearing. I typically just expect that the things that I hear when I am not trying to scratch beneath the surface are more or less marketing.