Apple Chips + Me
I am a MacBook Pro user. Consider that a confession, a disclaimer, or a fact of life.
I have, at various times in my career, used company-issued PCs to perform company work. I have done so with a smile on my face; if they can hold up to my professional needs, I will make it work.
But for my personal life? At this very moment I am using my tried-and-true early 2015 MacBook Pro, running the newly released Monterey. Despite being 6 years old, this chunk of hardware continues to run smoothly. I have worked on newer Macs and they have been great (except for the lack of MagSafe) but not good enough to make an upgrade worthwhile for me. The 2015 is an excellent vintage.
While everyone has an opinion on whether to buy a PC or Mac, for most companies their purchases come down to CapEx and budget. That often translates to a basic PC that meets the bare minimum of needs or recycling older Macs for new team members. It’s almost unheard of for companies to swap out every machine used by their engineering team when they’re still (relatively) new. Until now.
Announced last month, the latest Macbook Pros feature new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips. After using Intel chips for over a decade, Apple switched to developing a line of chips in-house. The M1 chip was launched last year in the Macbook Air with a goal to deliver faster processing without hogging power or taking up a lot of space inside the machine. It worked.
For an easy-to-consume technical breakdown of what makes the M1 chip magical, check out this great write-up Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast?.
Building off that success, Apple created the M1 Pro and Mac chips which have even faster performances being clocked- in some reports, double the capability of many laptops actively in use at companies.
“The CPU in M1 Pro and M1 Max delivers up to 70 percent faster CPU performance than M1, so tasks like compiling projects in Xcode are faster than ever. The GPU in M1 Pro is up to 2x faster than M1, while M1 Max is up to an astonishing 4x faster than M1, allowing pro users to fly through the most demanding graphics workflows.” ”
That got my attention and I’m not alone.
“The M1 Macs are the new software engineer status symbol” - Protocol.com, Nov. 8, 2021
Over the last few weeks, tech companies like Shopify, Uber, and Twitter have announced that they are rolling out the M1 Max-powered Macbook Pro to their engineers as quickly as they can get them in. It seems that mobile engineers are receiving priority for many organizations, likely due to the reduction most notable in their typical build times.
The debate begins: is the shortened build time worth the upfront cost of the equipment? Is it worth the investment in porting tools, changes in DevOps and processing pipelines, to move over to a new army of machines? For some, the answer is unequivocally YES.
“The most “idle” time engineers spend - especially in mobile development - is waiting on the build. These companies instrument machines so they know that on average, an engineer runs the build X times per day, waiting Y minutes or hours...
... With the M1, the answer is a no-brainier. The $4,000 per engineer spent will bring back *so* much more productivity versus top-of-the-market Intel ones, including the 2021 one.”
And for me? I placed my order for a new MacBook Pro this week. The lure of the M1 chip series was too strong- and the return to a MagSafe power connection and dedicated function keys (goodbye, Touch Bar!) more than sealed the deal for me. While my 2015 laptop will continue to be loved and used, I cannot wait to meet its newest family member. Finally, a machine that made a change worthwhile (for me).