You almost definitely speak the truth, but that kind of attitude towards performance is why so many apps are so awful to use now. Especially if you can’t afford the newest Mac.

The one I’m using is $1000. That’s a bit pricey, but strikes me as reasonable value for money. Especially since this is the best performing laptop I’ve ever used.

I get what you’re saying though. Many folks might only have budgets in the range of $500-800. With any luck, other manufacturers get their shit together.

Some people have budgets of $0; they have to use the device they're using currently. I'm already feeling empathy for them in a year or two once all their apps are written by software engineers on Apple silicon Macs who don't test performance on older hardware…

If their budget is $0 then Sublime Text isn't an option, so I'm not sure what you're arguing here.

Sublime Text costs $100.

Sublime Text can (and is) used by many people who pay nothing for it. And, to be clear, I was talking about apps in general, not just Sublime Text–which is one of the few apps I trust to not fall victim to the issues I described.

All of the worst performing apps on OSX are cross-platform.

So not sure why you're feeling sympathy when you will have exactly the same performance issues only without the power and efficiency of the M1 SOC.

That is true, but it's possible to avoid using those. What you can't avoid using the actual OS itself. Try booting into Yosemite sometime and comparing your computer's idle resource usage to the latest Big Sur and you'll see what I mean: try as I might, I cannot get the computer to use less than 5% CPU usage, while this used to be trivial.

I think GP was actually saying that with any luck the editor devs get their shit together and make their apps load fast even on older hardware.

Buying recent computer hardware for software performance reasons is hardly new, and hardly seems like something to be avoided.

M1 macs are the first Apple devices where I feel you're getting excellent value for money and they are super affordable for what they are.

These are professional tools, you're going to need to invest into hardware to get a good experience - if you value your time at all you'll be spending a good ammount of money on a laptop, high quality chair, good desk, monitor and peripheral.

If you're an amateur or a student then you can afford to wait.

It's like me complaining that my amateur drill overheats on hard surfaces and I can't drill through stuff realiably without cracks - if I need to do a few holes here and there the cheap stuff will do, if I do this for a living I'm expected to have gear that will save me time and improve my results.

Performance is a feature, and it doesn't rank very high past some critical threshold (which is why people switched to VSCode - other features matter more)

You sound like a really amateurish marketing firm.

What am I selling exactly ? The idea that it's ridiculous to expect people to optimise professional tools for your 5+ years old hardware ?

Vscode existed long before m1 macs. I think designing software that only has acceptable performance on hardware that doesn't even exist yet is where the contention lies. That's hyperbole but I think what is being discussed is more the tendency of developers to be lazy when it comes to performance because the latest and greatest hardware makes their software snappy.

Sure. If it works on 5 year old hardware, it almost certainly works even better on new hardware. I don't find this an unreasonable expectation.

Works on != runs fast, I think vscode runs on raspberry pi or something along those lines.

Sublime opens just as fast

On my, 2015 Macbook pro (16 GB RAM)

and my 2012 Macbook pro (2 GB RAM).

Instantly.

Nothing else on my 2012 Mac opens that fast. Not MacVim. Not emacs. Not TextEdit. Not even the terminal.

Emacsclient is instant on any hardware I ever tried since the early 90s. I don’t understand why people differentiate below the 100ms level.

Everything opens instantly on M1. Enjoy it while software hasn't slowed down accordingly.

For people not fortunate enough to own an M1, it’s a slow to start typical Electron app. Don’t get me wrong, I love and use VS Code. But performance isn’t in the same league.

Sublime Text basically does what you describe above on ANY hardware.

Anecdotal, but on my Intel/Windows laptop, VSCode opens instantly and has my sizable project loaded in <1s.

I have one Electon app that I wrote myself and it's pretty fast as well even though it deals with a boatload of things, and I didn't really put any special effort in to achieve that.

Both on my current laptop (which is admittedly a 10th gen i7) and my older one (8th gen i5).

Not to say that Sublime doesn't load faster. I'd almost be surprised if it doesn't. But the whole "Electron apps are slow" trope really needs to go.

Saying it's a trope is wild. In almost any comparative metric you could think of, they are slow.

It doesn't open instantly on my work (Windows) desktop. But then I don't care as I generally open it and leave it open all day.

Same with Spacemacs. because of the way processes are more expensive on Windows, Emacs/Spacemacs is many order of magnitude slower than it is on *nix (the other places I use it). I tolerate it as I can't live without magit and Org and other staples.

I find the crappy Slack app (another Electron app) is also slow to open, load and update. So much so, I prefer to use their web client in a browser.

Anecdotal, also, but that's two Electron apps which are sluggish on fairly recent (3 years) hardware.

> Emacs/Spacemacs is many order of magnitude slower

Look into emacsclient.

A good tip, and I indeed already use it.

I mean... I would hope pretty much anything opens ~instantly on the most absolute cutting edge custom-designed SoC from one of the richest companies in the world. hahah ;)

Spotify must have missed the memo because it's by far the slowest app on my computer.

you would hope, yes you would hope.

For now... Wait a few months/a year and they will find a reason to "take advantage" of that increase in performance and slow it back down again.

On M1, Sublime is still faster than VSCode to open. The bouncing icon is not even done bouncing back down that the whole project is open in Sublime. Yes still very fast in Vs Studio, but there's always something nice about Sublime being able to get to a file so quickly.

VSCode opens <1 second on my Dell XPS as well.

takes my M1 mac about 3s to open

macOS does a notarization check with Apple servers the first time, can take a while. On subsequent runs the certificate is cached, so should be much quicker.