[thawaway1837]

I don’t get this.

You’re basically locking yourself to a single development eco system, and a highly limited deployment eco system.

It’s not clear what the benefits of either are either. I get that the MacBook gets great performance for battery life but the majority of work is gonna be done in desktop settings, so simply using more/equally powerful x86 chips is only gonna cost you a few dollars a developer per year in electricity costs.

And all that despite the fact that your development is on Docker which doesn’t even have a working solution for the workflow you’re considering at the moment.

[jackcodes]

It‘s currently in consideration and by the time we’re ready to make a call on it, Docker will be too. They almost are in fact.

But consider that we may be optimising for different things. Most new developers I hire can be thrown a MacBook and they’ll know what to do, Linux on the other hand doesn’t have that guarantee especially towards the junior and front-end market segments of where I work. It’s a (real) broad strokes opinion, but I’m of the belief that macOS and by extension MacBooks offer us fewer overheads in terms of setup, maintenance, onboarding, tooling suitability for the median developer. So that leaves us using macOS.

This is the factor we’re optimising for more than deployment portability - we optimise for vendor lock-in in less than the developer experience for the median of our developers. For many of us on this forum we may be best with Linux on a bleeding edge distro, but for our preferences we deploy MacBooks for portability. Whether it helps things overall, this is in Manila where a net monthly salary is often less than the cost of a laptop, so we deploy one device that can be transported between home and work as required for those that don’t have a personal device.

With that, I see this as Apple locking us into that ecosystem rather than a choice we’re making on our side, so I’d rather lean into this and explore it further than doing nothing. If it comes out positive then we’ll be ready to make the switch before Apple forces us into it, and if not we’ll deploy something thinkpad-esque and keep our production instances x86.

[nbzso]

"With that, I see this as Apple locking us into that ecosystem rather than a choice we’re making on our side, so I’d rather lean into this and explore it further than doing nothing. If it comes out positive then we’ll be ready to make the switch before Apple forces us into it, and if not we’ll deploy something thinkpad-esque and keep our production instances x86."

As a long time Apple user (personally and staff wise), please don't tie your business decisions with company that treats professional users badly, every time they can. Your median developer benefits from Linux knowledge in general, you can deploy stable distribution without fear of compatibility problems after minor software update.

Apple marketing and lure is great, I have fallen for their game for 20 years. But I cannot be comfortable with ideas, business and management practices that this generation of Apple deploys.

[Toutouxc]

> company that treats professional users badly > ideas, business and management practices that this generation of Apple deploys

Can you please elaborate?

[AsyncAwait]

They destroyed entire indie businesses by arbitrary changes and/or enforcement of App Store policies, not to mention they're leading the war on general purpose computing as we know it by locking everything down.

I want to be able to tell my children I didn't participate in that.

[nbzso]

If I compile the list of all anti professional moves that Apple has made in recent years I will get depressed and I don't like to be depressed:)) Here, watch this funny rant from proven Apple professional user, may be it will give you some insight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKJjLwMUPJI

On other hand most valuable company in the world uses slave labor and gives the consumer highest possible price, I cannot support this dynamic anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeEERdbfH0c

[simonh]

M1 performance is about much more than just battery life, it’s screaming fast is raw execution power as well. In single core it’s even competitive with Ryzen for goodness sake. That’s just mental.

I don’t see this as a significant lock in risk. It’s not like Apple are the only company selling ARM laptops and desktops, and it seems clear Google, Microsoft and Amazon among others are serious about ARM.