I have a macbook and am happy with it, so not a hater, but...
A lot of outlets have pointed out that the M1 chip came out in this kind of interim period between Intel and AMD releases, so performance comparisons were a little misleading.
If you compare M1 chips to more recent AMD chips (I'm less clear about Intel), they're more similar. There's differences in power use and singlecore versus multicore attributes but overall they're much more similar than you'd conclude based on when M1 first came out. M1 is still very nice and efficient, but not absurdly better, or maybe even better at all.
There's a lot of issues with memory use (leaks, excessive use) on M1 laptops. There was just a post about this here on HN. The issue is sometimes raised without awareness of it as a general trend, but it keeps coming up over and over. So far I haven't seen any explanation for why it happens or how to avoid it, but it's real. Just Google "macbook memory leaks" and you'll see plenty of discussion. As far as I know, there's been some red herring solutions but no actual resolution.
It's not really an issue for many, perhaps even most, emacs users. I have a my emacs set to launch when my window manager starts on login, after which it stays open until I log off or shut the computer down. Emacs and Vim have such different workflows that this type of comparison isn't all that meaningful.
Nah, that's fair. I've got about runs ls -l | wc -l 143 packages that I load. My Emacs config is pretty heavy. I keep trying to trim it down a bit. Though, sometimes I have edit sessions that last several weeks, so it's not that bit a deal. But still.
Two things. Emacs as a daemon! And. Emacs 28 native compilation. Absolute game changer for speed in a million ways. Scrolling a 5000 line python source file with all the packages, syntax highlighting, etc etc, is buttery smooth:
Yeah… I should probably set up the daemon sometime. I just tweak my config so much (it's Emacs, c'mon) that it's just been simpler for me for some reason to just launch it fresh for forever.
native-comp doesn't do anything for start up. Good tip though—I've been running bleeding-edge Emacs for a while now. ;-)
I ran `esup` and figured out most of the slowdown is from the otherwise excellent straight.el [1] package manager. I put
Native comp doesn't do anything for for startup implicitly, absolutely. There are no startup optimizations or anything like that. However, the speed with which elisp runs on native comp seems to be between 1.5 and 10 times faster. I run emacs on a lot of underpowered arm devices (think rpi zero) and use my full config. And the decrease in startup time on those machines was astonishing.
A lot of outlets have pointed out that the M1 chip came out in this kind of interim period between Intel and AMD releases, so performance comparisons were a little misleading.
If you compare M1 chips to more recent AMD chips (I'm less clear about Intel), they're more similar. There's differences in power use and singlecore versus multicore attributes but overall they're much more similar than you'd conclude based on when M1 first came out. M1 is still very nice and efficient, but not absurdly better, or maybe even better at all.
There's a lot of issues with memory use (leaks, excessive use) on M1 laptops. There was just a post about this here on HN. The issue is sometimes raised without awareness of it as a general trend, but it keeps coming up over and over. So far I haven't seen any explanation for why it happens or how to avoid it, but it's real. Just Google "macbook memory leaks" and you'll see plenty of discussion. As far as I know, there's been some red herring solutions but no actual resolution.