Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production for Mac

Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by mrweasel on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @01:02PM (#26958590)

You can even go back to 2013 and not notice that you’re using a 7-8 year old machine. A MacBook Pro from late 2013 runs Big Sur and performs fine for most everyday use use case and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE. You just can’t run Chrome all the well, which should tell you more about Chrome than Macs.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by inDigiNeous on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @03:37PM (#26960462)

Still using a mid-2014 Macbook Pro with 16 gigs of ram and a 2.5 GHz quad-core i7 as my daily driver. Everything performs just fine to me, and macOS has even got faster during this time I've used the laptop, which is something to give credit to Apple for.

I use mainly VSCode these days though and Firefox, but even Unity game engine works just fine on this machine.

Any IDE I also throw at this machine works just fine. Only things that feel slow, are things that need a beefy GPU.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by hugi on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @01:15PM (#26958771)

I do all my work (java/postgres etc) on a 2012 i7 Mac Mini. It used to be my home media server but I started using it as a "temporary machine" last year after killing my 2018 15" MBP by spilling water over it. I was planning to replace it with an Apple Silicon machine once they became available, but it's performing so well I'm more than happy to keep using it while waiting for a 15" or 16" M1x/M2. Amazing little machines.

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Re:Apple's follow-up to M1 chip goes into mass production fo... by vladvasiliu on Tuesday April 27, 2021 @01:54PM (#26959213)

> and any development work that doesn’t require an IDE

Probably depends on the IDE and the language. My impression is that newer computers (especially in the "consumer" / "general public" market) have especially improved efficiency. They're not much faster, but they last longer on smaller batteries.

My late 2013 15" (2.3 GHz / 16 GB RAM) works great with Pycharm for moderately sized projects. It's even usable for personal Rust projects (with the intellij-rust plugin).

For Rust it's somewhat slower than my i5-8500 desktop but not by much. For incremental compiles, I don't feel like I'm waiting around more. The i5 mainly wins when it can use all six cores.

It's however quite a bit faster than my work HP ProBook with an i5-8250U which is a much newer machine (2018 I'd say).

Aside from battery life, which is somewhat lesser, all in all the mac is a much, much better machine than the HP, especially for "creature comforts": gorgeous screen, no misaligned panels rubbing against my wrists, great trackpad, no random coil whine, inaudible fans unless it starts compiling for a while, no background noise on the headphone out, integrated optical output when I want to use my home stereo.

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