Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Developers/Musicians using M1+ Macs

trickster is meaningless

trickster is meaningless

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 10, 2016
266
198
Basingstoke, UK
Hey all,

A lot of the focus around the M1 is on video/photo editing. However there aren't a huge number of reports on audio or software development. I'm going to refer to M1 here as the generation rather than the specific chip, so that'll encompass the Pro/Max/Ultra. My daily driver is a 2016 MBP, which is fine, but I'm looking at a Studio to replace my Mac mini as an always on server and "grunt power" machine.

Audio
I understand Logic is now a universal app, so can run natively on M1 and slowly third parties are releasing native/universal installers. For example, I see Kontakt Player from Native instruments became a native app recently. How are people finding the general ecosystem? Has anyone found any issues with hardware, like audio interfaces? I'm not really worries about benchmarks, but has the transition been stable? Or stable enough for you?

Software Development
So on a day to day basis, I work as a software dev but do a fair bit of DevOps too. I use JetBrains IDEs for Java, Python and a few other bits, these seem to have been ported (except some of the C# stuff, but I don't use that). On top of this, I use home-brew and docker quite a lot. I'm aware any x86 images will need to go through translation, which may be a big performance hit. How have people found this? I've seen some reports that docker is quite slow on M1, but it seems to be getting better with time. As far as VMs go, I'm expecting this to be a bit painful to start with. Virtual Box aren't making any noises about supporting non-x86 hosts, but UTM seems to be an option for native ARM VMs. I predominantly use Ubuntu and CentOS VMs, so windows isn't an issue. Has this been ok for people?

Any experiences, good or bad, are useful
Thanks in advance
 
M1is currently the fastest - by far - architecture for software development, unless of course you have to do x86 or windows specific stuff. Compilers and tools just fly on these CPUs. The humongous caches and excellent beach prediction performance makes all the difference. I work with R, Python, C++, Rust and occasional Haskell and the performance is insane.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ahurst, Juraj22, trickster is meaningless and 1 other person
trickster is meaningless said:
Hey all,

A lot of the focus around the M1 is on video/photo editing. However there aren't a huge number of reports on audio or software development. I'm going to refer to M1 here as the generation rather than the specific chip, so that'll encompass the Pro/Max/Ultra. My daily driver is a 2016 MBP, which is fine, but I'm looking at a Studio to replace my Mac mini as an always on server and "grunt power" machine.

Audio
I understand Logic is now a universal app, so can run natively on M1 and slowly third parties are releasing native/universal installers. For example, I see Kontakt Player from Native instruments became a native app recently. How are people finding the general ecosystem? Has anyone found any issues with hardware, like audio interfaces? I'm not really worries about benchmarks, but has the transition been stable? Or stable enough for you?

Software Development
So on a day to day basis, I work as a software dev but do a fair bit of DevOps too. I use JetBrains IDEs for Java, Python and a few other bits, these seem to have been ported (except some of the C# stuff, but I don't use that). On top of this, I use home-brew and docker quite a lot. I'm aware any x86 images will need to go through translation, which may be a big performance hit. How have people found this? I've seen some reports that docker is quite slow on M1, but it seems to be getting better with time. As far as VMs go, I'm expecting this to be a bit painful to start with. Virtual Box aren't making any noises about supporting non-x86 hosts, but UTM seems to be an option for native ARM VMs. I predominantly use Ubuntu and CentOS VMs, so windows isn't an issue. Has this been ok for people?

Any experiences, good or bad, are useful
Thanks in advance
Click to expand...
I’m also DevOps / developer the m1 pro base was good but I did run out of ram so I upgrade it to the m1 pro base cpu with 32GB of ram
 
5425642 said:
I’m also DevOps / developer the m1 pro base was good but I did run out of ram so I upgrade it to the m1 pro base cpu with 32GB of ram
Click to expand...
Thanks for the replies. Yeah, I’d have probably snapped up an M1 mini if it had 32gb, but 16gb is what I have at present and is the main bottleneck. Have you noticed any performance drops with containers or is it generally ok?
 
trickster is meaningless said:
Thanks for the replies. Yeah, I’d have probably snapped up an M1 mini if it had 32gb, but 16gb is what I have at present and is the main bottleneck. Have you noticed any performance drops with containers or is it generally ok?
Click to expand...
I have not notice any performance drop, using docker. For every update Apple does it works better ofc. But I have not notice any major issues.

I'm using my Mbp for work etc. so it's a important peace of hardware for me :)
 
That's good to know. Thank you. I imagine I'd see a huge performance increase from my machines anyway, purely down to age even through a translation/emulation layer. I better start saving for my new Studio ??
 
trickster is meaningless said:
That's good to know. Thank you. I imagine I'd see a huge performance increase from my machines anyway, purely down to age even through a translation/emulation layer. I better start saving for my new Studio 😀😀
Click to expand...
Just buy what you need now :)
That’s how I use to do, but what I need now and after 3-4 years I need to update and then I can buy the newest.
If you buy overkill now to future proof then it can last for 6-8 years sure but do you want to keep it so long?

Instead take that money and put it in savings until you need yo upgrade next time :)
 
trickster is meaningless said:
Software Development
So on a day to day basis, I work as a software dev but do a fair bit of DevOps too. I use JetBrains IDEs for Java, Python and a few other bits, these seem to have been ported (except some of the C# stuff, but I don't use that). On top of this, I use home-brew and docker quite a lot. I'm aware any x86 images will need to go through translation, which may be a big performance hit. How have people found this? I've seen some reports that docker is quite slow on M1, but it seems to be getting better with time. As far as VMs go, I'm expecting this to be a bit painful to start with. Virtual Box aren't making any noises about supporting non-x86 hosts, but UTM seems to be an option for native ARM VMs. I predominantly use Ubuntu and CentOS VMs, so windows isn't an issue. Has this been ok for people?
Click to expand...

If you use Ubuntu, you can run Ubuntu ARM VMs on M1 Macs using Multipass. This gives you configurations similar to Ubuntu instances on cloud providers like AWS. If you are deploying to ARM Linux on AWS this could be very useful.

I think you can run Ubuntu ARM desktop distros using Parallels but I am not sure. Parallels is quite expensive of course. I haven't heard of any plans to port Virtual Box or VM Ware Fusion to M1.

Docker supports native ARM images of course and runs Natively on the M1 Macs but the docker ecosystem is still very X86 centric. Its going to be a while before ARM makes big inroads I think.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Xiao_Xi
ADGrant said:
If you use Ubuntu, you can run Ubuntu ARM VMs on M1 Macs using Multipass. This gives you configurations similar to Ubuntu instances on cloud providers like AWS. If you are deploying to ARM Linux on AWS this could be very useful.

I think you can run Ubuntu ARM desktop distros using Parallels but I am not sure. Parallels is quite expensive of course. I haven't heard of any plans to port Virtual Box or VM Ware Fusion to M1.

Docker supports native ARM images of course and runs Natively on the M1 Macs but the docker ecosystem is still very X86 centric. Its going to be a while before ARM makes big inroads I think.
Click to expand...
Thanks, I think UTM seems to be a pretty good replacement for VMs for ARM compatible VMs. If I need x86, it looks like parallels is the only option. However, I'm not going to retire my 2012 Mac mini or 2016 MBP yet, so I have some options.

5425642 said:
Just buy what you need now :)
That’s how I use to do, but what I need now and after 3-4 years I need to update and then I can buy the newest.
If you buy overkill now to future proof then it can last for 6-8 years sure but do you want to keep it so long?

Instead take that money and put it in savings until you need yo upgrade next time :)
Click to expand...
I tend to be on an 8 year cycle for my machines, however the last Mac mini update coincided with moving, the the apple silicon announcement made me decide to hold out and play about with a Hackintosh. However that's waaay to power hungry to leave on 24/7, and ultimately was a fun experiment but I doubt I'll repeat it. I think I'm going to wait for reviews, although WWDC will be here before delivery by the looks of things. I certainly don't need an Ultra, but I suspect I'll go for the higher Max with 64GB and maybe 2TB, so its a £3.5k, which I don't have a problem with at all. That'll pay for itself in very little time.
 
trickster is meaningless said:
Thanks, I think UTM seems to be a pretty good replacement for VMs for ARM compatible VMs. If I need x86, it looks like parallels is the only option. However, I'm not going to retire my 2012 Mac mini or 2016 MBP yet, so I have some options.
Click to expand...
Parallels does not support x86 VMs on Apple Silicon.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back