Is Apple silicon ready website to browse if the software you use is compatible yet or can run through Rosetta 2.Things to considerīefore considering this as your main machine check: With some tweaks, I managed to run some of them, but others without luck. Around half of them don't work on the M1 with docker for M1 preview. When I finally managed to do that, BigSur had an update and after that, the arm version ofĪnd certain images that work on my Windows 10 laptop or on an Intel MacBook. I spent countless hours getting around some issues like for a Gatsby project I could not make the 'sharp' module work. I did see that with very little use - like a few Chrome tabs + other background apps that run by default it will quickly consume the 'standard' 8GB of RAM. But it does use SSD swap, so that's interesting. With a local frontend workflow (build and running unit tests), lots of Chrome tabs open, docker running a few containers, VSCode, Spotify, and other programs running in the background I haven't seen it use more than '~12,5GB' of RAM.

Can say for some frontend builds I was getting ~60% speed increases from my 2y old Dell XPS 15. ImpressionsĪ lot of my development work implies running Also, I noticed that the 16 GB model barely uses less than ~7-8GB RAM but I'll get to that later. I went for 16GB of RAM because some of my development workflows require running multiple docker containers locally, and we all know how much memory docker consumes. So buying an M1 laptop didn't make sense - since I can use my laptop when I need portability. I don't like staring into small laptop screens, so for using both my monitors and also having more ports I have chosen the Mac Mini instead of the MacBooks.Īlso, I am working remotely and already have a Dell XPS 15 laptop. I wanted to use it with - 2 big monitors (M1 MacBooks support only one external display - although there are workarounds). Why I choose the M1 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM I'll use it for frontend workflows that involve running a bunch of the node.js tasks + mock APIs + continuously running tests in the background. TLDR - I didn't choose the M1 Mac Mini as a mainly daily driver - yet - until docker will be fully supported. I can say I was very impressed by the benchmarks results given by those machines, so I decided to try one out.

Why do developers use mac reddit