Apple Silicon M1: A Developer's Perspective
I&#x27;m a developer as well and don&#x27;t use apps like VSCode, or Java&#x2F;Gradle... but instead develop open source projects running Python, and Rust.<p>1. For my open source projects, running tests has sped up so much that I find it more of a joy to work on this projects now. Test suites that take ~60 seconds on my 2017 MacBook Pro i7, now take just ~15 seconds. That&#x27;s a HUGE win in the edit, run test suite cycle.<p>2. My Rust projects now compile in WAY less time. Something that used to take 3 minutes to compile + link for a debug build is now down to 40 seconds. Once again, this has increased my productivity in the edit, compile, test cycle.<p>For other projects like node&#x2F;npm the speedups are also massive and running various pipelines to go from source code to final deployable object is also much faster.<p>I use vim to develop, and it runs on Rosetta just fine, so I can continue to use all my existing plugins. I don&#x27;t extensively use docker containers, but for those I connect to the cloud instead of running them locally, which is a move I was already making even on my Intel based MacBook Pro.<p>I got the 16GB 13&quot; MacBook Pro. I, like the blog author, was thinking of this as a secondary laptop, something fun to have around, but I have hardly touched my old 15&quot; MacBook Pro because this one does everything I already need. And does it faster.<p>I&#x27;ve been living with 16GB of RAM forever, so maybe I am used to fitting in that memory space... I avoid Electron based apps like the plague, and with being able to run iPad&#x2F;iOS apps on the M1, I&#x27;ve been able to cut down even further since things like Authy are way faster to launch when they aren&#x27;t large Chrome based hogs.<p>I am looking forward to the 16&quot; MacBook Pro&#x27;s with Apple Silicon based processors, but only because I do miss the additional screen real-estate, and prefer the larger size. But the 13&quot; MacBook Pro M1 has been absolutely fantastic so far.