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SonicDev
SonicDev

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M1 Macbook Air after 1 month of development

After years of dreaming of buying the perfect laptop, I finally bought it, the new M1 Macbook Air(512GB SSD and 8GB RAM version). Great build, good keyboard, no fans(yet no thermal issues), fast, light, great screen, good speakers, and a battery that lasts a day. So far, everything about it was good.

I was hesitant to buy this machine because I was worried that running my development software on Rosetta 2(non-native ARM) would hinder the performance. But I was amazed by how fast this machine is. Everything ran smoothly, and installations were like nothing even changed with the Mac.

The first and only time it had a hiccup on me was performance testing the Table component I created. I haven't implemented any optimizations on my table. So I tried displaying 5,000 rows in 1 go, and I've noticed some slowdowns when switching windows. I was curious if this was also present in my work laptop, a 10th gen Intel MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM. So I tried and did the same thing with it. It looks like it's only a bit faster(ahead by 2-3 seconds on the initial render of rows).

In my conclusion, I think it is an excellent machine. I think you won't need to upgrade any time soon if you buy any Apple Silicon powered Mac. It competes with the last-gen Macbook with higher specs, and if not always, faster. My M1 Macbook Air is a fanless machine that is not even hot to the touch than my Intel MacBook that is ALWAYS hot to the touch, and fans are always ramping up to the max. This is probably the best bang for buck machine for any developer.

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