I have the base model $1k M2 air and it functions excellently as a development machine. Both web dev for work (running multiple react clients, node servers, Pg instances, docker containers, etc all at the same time), and for basic game dev for recreation - though admittedly I’m using Godot for that which is among the lighter weight game engines available.

That to say, it’s far more than a glorified Facebook machine and is a truly excellent value. I much prefer it over my work issued intel MacBook Pro.

That’s not true at all. Have you actually used one?

Edit: obviously if you need a windows vm you’re out of luck at 8gb ram

You’re out of luck if you need docker.

M1 Macs would make fantastic Linux laptops, because macOS is appallingly bad at backend development. It makes it up in sheer hardware power and efficiency, otherwise I’d be completely at loss why it’s so loved.

> macOS is appallingly bad at backend development

That's news to me. In what way are they bad compared to Linux? Both can run docker, Intellij, Insomnia and Dbeaver.

The main thing is Docker requires emulation

True although if you develop for arm then you can use virtualisation. Still, performance wise I've not noticed any impact.

Docker runs fine... Both x64 and arm64 containers run

It requires a full VM. macOS is the only OS with that requirement.

And? It still runs fine.

It works. It doesn’t work fine. It breaks, sometimes in a way you need to manually clean it up.

I used the M1 Air 8/256 as a dev machine for a whole year. It was faster than a 16/512 Intel 16" MBP from 2019.

Calling it a Facebook machine is silly.