You will not feel a difference in coding/dev work between M1 to M6 in a relevant manner.

user43928 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Two years ago maybe, when I wrote code by hand.

Today development work is limited by compile times and test run times, particularly with UI tests in the iOS simulator.

Hardware on the development machine finally maters.

	▲	booty 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I work on a big web monolith on an M5 Pro 48GB. I'm usually running about ~4 instances of it locally in separate Git worktrees, which (in our setup) means I'm also running 4 copies of the whole stack: web, frontend, Redis, Postgres, etc. These are rebuilt and torn down multiple times per day. Lot of frontend assets to compile. Additionally, like many people in corporate environments, we do of course also pay a performance tax thanks to the security software we need to run. So perf does matter for us. We could, of course, alternatively... just run cheap shitboxes locally and have all our dev environments in the cloud. Certainly appealing in many ways from a cost perspective and you don't even need to give up DX really. However, in the next ~5 years, as "actually useful" local LLM inference starts to become genuinely useful (for software engineering, this seems to roughly mean "the ability to run 28B+ models at usable speeds") then having local compute horsepower might start to look more attractive again. Even if it's not an absolute winner on cost/utility alone, the data privacy and cost certainty have value to many.

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eknkc 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have an M1 and M4 Max at office. I feel the sluggishness of M1 now, after years it finally started to show its age.

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coredog64 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Have been considering a used M1 but I'm concerned that I'm going to get flash storage that's been thrashed to within an inch of it's life by someone running it as a poorly configured inference host.

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Zylokloto 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are sooo sooo many students and normal people using these devices or corporate laptops never seen inferencing or anything like this, its so hard to trash the storage of them, i wouldn't worry about it.

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mandarinclips 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Where's a reliable place to buy a used Mac? I'm afraid of ending up with a broken unit.

	▲	linguae 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Last week I purchased a MacBook Pro M1 Max from www.macsales.com, which is owned by Other World Computer, a maker of Mac peripherals. My computer comes with a 1-year warranty. It was my first time purchasing from them.

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mandarinclips 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, I know. The problem is that used prices right now are almost the same as what they used to cost brand new. Prices have gone up way too much.

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nodesocket 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I also can feel a speed/sluggishness difference between my M1 Max MacBook Pro and my M4 Pro (14 core).

	▲	jtbayly 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Honest question: Which one feels faster?