Mike Peterson
A number of technology companies are giving their engineers and programmers new M1 Max MacBook Pros with maxed-out specifications, likely because of the time-saving performance of the new models.
Uber, for example, is giving 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M1 Max chips and 64GB of RAM to all of its active iOS engineers. Twitter too is giving "fully loaded" MacBook Pros to its iOS and Android engineers.
Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer also noted earlier in November that Shopify was making similar M1 Max-powered upgrades to its engineers' toolkits. Additionally, Orosz explained the thinking about why companies are moving toward maxed-out MacBook Pros.
"Why and how are they doing it? The scoop: They obsess about developer productivity, and the M1 is such a big, measurable step-up that it's an instant buy. Not just for them, but any other company who cares about engineers similar to how they do," Orosz wrote.
Orosz went on to explain that when new hardware hits the market, teams benchmark build times and crunch the numbers to figure out if the investment would be worthwhile.
"How much time would a $4,000, top-of-the market machine like the M1 shave off from each build? How much total time over 2 years? How much 'value' does this time mean per engineer?" He wrote. "With the M1, the answer is a no-brainier."
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8 Comments
Lucky folks, that machine is SWEET
There's a channel here that tests some development workflows, docker, Java etc and the build times and temperature are way better than the i9:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm7rdAxmbxE
https://www.youtube.com/c/D3VTec/videos
There's a test on that channel running multiple mobile simulators and being able to do that with no fan noise would just make working with the laptop so much better.
There's a Unity game engine test here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTFcN2SRKm0
Again, everything runs much smoother without the fan noise. The real-time view was running at 120FPS vs around 30FPS on the Intel model. The native version glitched a few times as it's in beta so like the guy says in the video, it will take time for the bugs in the native versions to be resolved but even on the Rosetta version the performance is way better than before.
And, like all of Apple's non-upgradeable machines, buying maxed out is typically better for longevity.
We've been about to upgrade 2012 base Mac minis to large SSDs & 16 GB of RAM to keep them in service for almost a decade.
We've built our 2012 Mac Pro up to running with 128 GB of RAM 48 TB of SSD & 200 TB of fibre over the same time period.
With the newer machines, specifically the laptops, we need to spec them out for the future (and pay the premium for that)
We pay today's costs for higher specs, even though we are buying them for (hopefully) 5 years down the road.
This is a great recruitment tool but it's a bit of a waste in terms of productivity. The 10-core M1 Pro seems to be the sweet spot for the vast majority of developers. That extra graphical power isn't going to help.
Based on a couple of friends' experiences there, I don't think even a tricked out MacBook Pro would make it worthwhile to work for a company like Twitter.