I got the 16" M1 Max from work and adore it. I do Rails mostly and it's fantastic. We have a Rails based ETL app that pulls data from Oracle into a local Postgres with tons and tons of transformations. The Mac significantly outperforms our production server with Xeon Gold CPUs despite running the app in Rosetta due to Oracle's lack of arm64 support.
I've also never heard the fan, even running 100% load for hours. I'm sure it's spinning a bit but you can't hear it and the machine isn't hot. My Coworkers' Dell laptops sound like a vacuum just running a Teams meeting.
My xps-15 sounds like a jet engine when I'm watching a YouTube video. Mainly because Ubuntu + Chrome + Nvidia chipset do not play well together so it's all software decoded. The solutions are either: "run all these brittle steps to built your own Chromium[1]"
or "go buy a different $3000 laptop because Linux (Ubuntu?) is very brittle when it comes to hardware support."
My third solution, which I promised myself I'd do over the holidays but never got to, is migrating fully over to MacOS so I can stop thinking so much about my tools and get back to thinking about my projects.
Nope, I wrote a dedicated app to do the ETL (which is Rails but doesn't actually run a webserver outside of development).
I'm transforming Peoplesoft data into something actually usable, so it's more complex than any off the shelf tools I looked at could tackle. It's my third time doing one of these so the code this time around is super clean and maintainable.
The university I work for is switching to Workday next year so when we're actually provided details on that I'll be sure to revisit Kiba. If Workday's DB is cleaner it could be a good option.
I've also never heard the fan, even running 100% load for hours. I'm sure it's spinning a bit but you can't hear it and the machine isn't hot. My Coworkers' Dell laptops sound like a vacuum just running a Teams meeting.