> Probably we will end up with most people on the final generation of Intel Macbooks so we have a while to figure it out.
If the early story around performance of the M1 bears out, I suspect this won't be the case. If their CPU for the base MacBook Air trouncing higher end MacBook Pros, what kind of a beast will their higher end CPUs going to be?
People who really need x86 compatibility will stick with x86 based Macs. Others? I'm not sure. For my current job where everything runs on node.js, the performance and battery life on the new CPU is pretty appealing.
You realize most engineers write software that runs in production on x86 Linux, right?
All that performance is going to be used to run cloud based Linux x86 development environments. Repl.it and Github codespaces are the real winners with the move to Apple Silicon
I'm not entirely sure that's true. Or at least not entirely relevant/ interesting.
First, you have thousands of developers writing code for iOS/ Android & Chromebooks. That right there is a pretty big chunk of developers. And at least for the iOS developers, running on ARM instead of x86 is a significant advantage.
Second, a lot of us are writing software for the web which means primarily writing software that runs in the browser. So long as we have a good running version of node.js and a browser to test with, we are golden. Assuming for a moment here that Google Chrome and Firefox are both going to be ported to ARM, I don't really see why I care about x86 linux except...
Of course you need to serve up your site and that piece is usually running on x86. Only... many of us are already crossing platforms. Our web server is Node on Linux and my dev system is MacOS (no Docker or Linux VM) so I'm already cross platform.
When I was primarily running a Python/ Django shop, it was a similar deal—so long as I was able to get Python running I was good. There are definitely a few places where you notice the difference, but there are definitely places where I can use an extra 50% battery life and a faster CPU as well.
I don't know how many other developers really need x86 and how many don't. I have had jobs where running Docker/ Kubernetes was important, but I've had a fair number where it wasn't as well.
If the early story around performance of the M1 bears out, I suspect this won't be the case. If their CPU for the base MacBook Air trouncing higher end MacBook Pros, what kind of a beast will their higher end CPUs going to be?
People who really need x86 compatibility will stick with x86 based Macs. Others? I'm not sure. For my current job where everything runs on node.js, the performance and battery life on the new CPU is pretty appealing.