Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS development

Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by asdff on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @05:52PM (#30521154)

Why do companies even build locally anymore? It's never been cheaper to spin up your own cluster that's going to be more than enough horsepower. If you give your devs the $899 air instead of the $2300 16", I feel like that $1400 surplus per dev would go a long way in buying some nodes that are going to still be some muscle 5 years from now. You could buy two mac minis per dev and set up an m1 cluster if you wanted. If you didn't want that overhead, plenty of companies sell compute by the second now these days too.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by paxys on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @06:39PM (#30521584)

Having your entire codebase and build process running on the machine in front of you has a lot of other efficiencies that an external cluster takes away. What about the overhead of syncing your code to the server every time you make a change, and getting the binaries back to test? What if you want to work from outside the office? What if the network connection is bad?

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by nix9000 on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @06:57PM (#30521730)

>What about the overhead of syncing your code to the server every time you make a change, and getting the binaries back to test? What if the network connection is bad?

A bad network connection is severely disruptive to almost all dev workflows so it's not a unique reason against remote development. The other factors you raise are not really relevant. The "overhead" of syncing code should be invisible with modern dev tools, and binaries should be built remotely anyway. I.e. the laptop should basically used as a thin client + web browser.

>What if you want to work from outside the office?

This is an argument in favor of remote development. When everything is on the cloud, it doesn't matter whether you are in the office, at home, or travelling.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by franciscop on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @07:54PM (#30522220)

Absolutely no way, I often work remotely and can go for hours without even network connection and still be 100% productive, all in my MacbookAir which is not too expensive.

If you are outside the office, chances are your internet connection is not as good. The scenario given here where everything is in the cloud sounds like a nightmare for me.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by recursive on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @08:15PM (#30522414)

What are these modern dev tools? I'm still using git. In order to send my code anywhere, I have to make a commit.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by ARandomerDude on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @06:38PM (#30521576)

Developer happiness. Same reason my company doesn't make me fly economy when I travel. A cheap laptop says "drone on, you drones." A nice laptop says "we want you to be happy here."

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by ihateolives on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @03:13AM (#30525034)

I'm with you on point about laptop, because laptop is something that I use every day, but not on air travel.

Air travel is such a colossal waste of environment and time so to top it off with additional cost to the company for "developer experience" is so unnecessary. If a company wants me, a developer, to fly in in business class I'd immediately think that they prefer to concentrate on showing off instead of concentrating on things that really matter. Unless it's a fucking Ryanair (don't know what's US equivalent of shitty el cheapo airline), I'd be fine flying in economy. I'd rather the company spend the money on my salary or work environment instead of one time showoff so that I could sip champagne and put my feet up while flying for 4 hours.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by ARandomerDude on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @01:43PM (#30531072)

> Air travel is such a colossal waste of environment and time

You're sure? For everyone across all fields? The simple fact is in many professional contexts, air travel is mandatory (including for many developers). I fly several times a year for work because the nature of my development job demands it.

> I'd rather the company spend the money on my salary or work environment

This is the point I was making. Since I have to travel, a relatively cheap business class upgrade (not first class) is the company spending money on my work environment.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by criddell on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @08:08AM (#30526891)

Champagne? Sounds like you are describing first class and I was thinking the person you replied to was talking about business class. Typically, that's a seat closer to the front of the plane with a tiny bit more space.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by cmelbye on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @06:48PM (#30521658)

16" MBP with M1 Max is the best performing Apple computer available, according to GeekBench. Some Mac Pro configurations outperform on multi-core benchmarks, but those start at $6,500 for rack mounted configurations.

The new MBPs are incredible machines and worth the money in engineer productivity. for an iOS engineer, I'm not sure of a better set up from Apple's current line up.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by criddell on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @06:09PM (#30521318)

For a lot of companies, $1400 per developer isn't enough to worry about. That's probably a day or two of all-in developer time. Not worth it for something you are only paying for every year or two, especially if your developer prefers the 16" machine over the Air.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by dagmx on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @09:15PM (#30522863)

The cost to buy devs their own high spec devices, that makes them independent of any network issues, is a rounding error compared to the cost of the time and effort lost in maintaining the distributed build infrastructure, and the cost of lost work during network outages.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by root_axis on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @06:47PM (#30521647)

Build cluster is necessary for CI, but using it in place of local builds sucks from the developer perspective, especially when working remotely or when the build queue is stacked or when the scheduler randomly takes a dump and you need a sysadmin to kick something.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by pixel_tracing on Tuesday March 01, 2022 @06:54PM (#30521701)

Yea let me build a binary on the server to pull down and download to run on my phone.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by cudgy on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @02:07PM (#30531414)

What about the salvage value of the laptops? This analysis seems to ignore that. Macs hold their value quite nicely.

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Re:Why Apple’s new M1 chips are essential for rapid iOS deve... by dbbk on Wednesday March 02, 2022 @11:39AM (#30529265)

Even Apple is moving into this space with Xcode Cloud.

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