You're right about just having a beefier PC, but maybe a baseline M2/M3 Air to SSH into a local machine + a beefier PC is a good combination. Luckly I switched to an all in terminal dev experience with Neovim/Helix/Tmux and the advantage is that one can seamlessly mix ssh/mosh shells in this workflow. Don't even need to set up any VNC/RDPs/Moonlights. Maybe even that is not needed if your languages supports ccache like tools.
I'm mostly interested in compilation speed, maybe running some programs faster on beefier hardware and I don't mind working on Linux.
So to recap, a baseline Air for portability(or some light ryzen laptop) plus a medium range PC seems like a winning combination for me. Given you already have a case/psu/ssd together they can cost as an entry level m3 macbook pro with 8GB of RAM.
I can easily buy a laptop with 128GB RAM, eats more energy (100W+) and is more powerful. It's just that it does not have an Apple logo on it. Does it not count as a laptop?
In the literal sense? No. I don’t feel like those kinds of laptops are comfortable on my lap.
To be a bit more serious, yeah sure they are laptops, but you tend to sacrifice portability, battery life and comfort. Which for most people are pretty important metrics for a laptop. “Luggable” is a term sometimes used about this class of products.
I’m sure the poster was being hyperbolic. Of course you can find laptops with more RAM and some use cases that 64GB wouldn’t cover. But for most common tasks it’s more than enough.
Then in my experience, Apple did not make a pro laptop for a very long time until the M series came along.
I remember my MacBook Pro from 2009 getting hot enough to hurt my legs, let alone any from the following decade that ran hotter.
If it's drawing 100W then the poor battery life make it more like a semi-portable.
Also given what we know about male fertility I wouldn't have that anywhere near my lap.
Easy, just drop software support for it and force you to buy a new one... Or switch to Linux
At the same time it looks like great thing for Linux
With 64GB ram and our infrastructure defined with NixOS, I find myself building and spinning it up locally (in test mode) as part of working on it. Having ~10 VMs running locally with 2-3 GB of ram each quickly adds up.
It feels a little dirty, but it's really nice to have the possibility. :-)
For me the end is not reached and I'm looking forward to an upgrade in 3-5 years.
Mooooaaarrrrr javascript.
I'll probably get downvoted... by people using a wrapped Chrome engine. That, friends, is true irony.
I'm looking to upgrade to the Threadrippers [0] next year however and get even more of a speed advantage.
The servers have up to 6TB of ram each, but I mostly use one with 512GB.
I see that you can now order machines with 32TB of ram, like this one: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/mp/6u/sys-681e...
At release I would have said most people should stick with as little memory as they could get away with due to Apple's pricing and the non-upgradability. Nowadays, I'd either recommend the M3 or M3 Pro and keeping things cheaper, but if you're going to get the Max at all, I sort of feel like you may as well go for the 16c cpu/40c GPU/128gb option at $1500 USD more and play around with stuff like Laama. It will become obsolete in not too long due to memory tech marching forwards, but it's still going to be plenty capable of dabbling with this stuff for awhile. The M3 Max has the memory bandwidth of a 4 dimm DDR5-6400 server which is pretty impressive given the pricing.
Beyond that, I see people speccing high memory for things like VFX and Macs are pretty popular choices for those doing video work.
The only real difference I'm noticing is that emacs for some reason is just slower on osx than on linux, but that's not down to the raw performance, as even my 7 old Thinkpad with a 4-core i5 makes emacs feel way snappier than my macbook.
brew install emacs-plus@29 --with-native-comp
I have a 5950x when 128GB of RAM, and an M1 Max. I was performance testing some Clojure code a few days ago (pure number crunching in parallel), and I was shocked to see it running faster in every test case on my M1 Mac.
I think it might have more to do with memory bandwidth and thermals than the processing speed and cores.
I travel between three locations, just with my phone and NVMe disk. All three locations have identical setup: monitors, workstation, desk, chair... Computer for me is a just docking station for a harddrive.
I really hated dealing with USB dongles, power suspend and all that stuff.
If I have to work on the go, I have bluetooth keyboard for my phone.
It works quite well, even for AMD CPUs.
I happen to have the same CPU as you and been running my Hackintosh setup smoothly for 1.5 years.
You can see my setup and full open core configuration here;
https://github.com/reimertz/hackintosh-x570i-5950x-6800xt
The only caveat is intel-only cpu instructions that might cause certain apps to not work. The adobe suite is one example.
As someone with a gaming computer, I never understood devs that use a laptop...
its way slower, waaaaaaay worse cooling = more noise and less expansion possible in terms of RAM, storage and ports.
I won't go into length about all the problems and expense and limitations of trying to get an CPU/PSU/GPU of an ATX gaming build similarly silent, except for two points. One is I've done the silent gaming build and Apple Silicon and I cannot recommend Apple silicon enough. Two is that it's ultimately futile to try and get a gaming build as silent as Apple silicon because the sheer fact you are pulling more power from the wall to get the same level of performance means you will get more coil whine on average.
In terms of less expansion:
- Having lots of storage on laptops is very arguably bad practice to begin with and you should be using a NAS or cloud storage. 1TB is realistically going to be enough storage for 90% of devs for the lifespan of their laptops.
- Apple Silicon memory may be less expandable, but it's also effectively GPU memory running octo-channel instead of dual-channel, which makes it an insane bargain when you look at the pricing of GPU memory. You can "expand" your gaming desktop to have 128gb of pooled GPU memory and higher memory bandwidth, it just will likely run you 5 figures.
- For ports, Apple is running three TB4 connectors and an HDMI 2.1 port with 168gb/s combined bandwidth with Wifi 6E/BT 5.3.
- Finally, Apple Silicon holds its resale value, so selling your current model and buying a different one if needed is really not THAT big of a deal.
M3 Max is better than 5950x maybe 90-95% of the time and its shored up its weaknesses in raw compute horsepower. That being said, I'm getting more interested in a workstation myself because the M-series has stagnated in terms of memory bandwidth and a couple of used 3090's are pretty cheap.
I would love to upgrade my personal intel MacBook.
Unfortunately (mebe) I found a killer deal on a 5950x last year and now I’ve got a beast of a workstation with 128gb ram.
I have actually found it hard to use my laptop anymore. Work laptop is a M1 with 64gb ram. It’s fast. But my workstation feels a lot more powerful. It’s hard to use either laptops and dealing with spinners and waiting.
Anyone else in the same boat?