Pros and Cons of Apple silicon for Elixir dev?

The only con is the difference in architecture from prod, requiring you to set up a CI of some sort.

Other than that, I don’t see nor am aware of any regressions.

Haven’t had too many issues some random libraries and support packages have issues but most the time there is a work around or an alternative package you can use. But these are mostly system level stuff not elixir or erlang themselves. Also usually using Rosetta does the trick but sucks juice out of the battery like crazy. So far haven’t had enough issues to warrant not buying one or trying to find intel macs.

The main one should be that you cannot just toss —platform linux/amd64 at Docker since QEMU does not support Erlang versions after OTP25. That means you don’t get to easily build multiarch images locally.
That’s really the only thing, though. Wonderful machines otherwise.

It can work, you just need to set this flag: Update Elixir and Erlang versions (#1939) · livebook-dev/livebook@6256b66 · GitHub

I am very new in the Apple silicon based development (just a couple of weeks). So far, I do love the extra autonomy due to low battery usage and the ability to have large unified memory to run memory-hungry servers (e.g. Elasticsearch).
An Elixir specific issue that, so far, I do not even know if it is possible to address, is how to utilise the GPU in ML training. While this was relatively easy with PyTorch, I think that Nx ecosystem does not support that, yet.
CPU tasks run a bit faster than the previous Intel based MBP (anecdotal impression close to 30%), but it is not game-changing.
As the others said, I might have to invest my time into employing containers, which is also a positive thing in the sense that I will learn something new (so far I only develop locally).
I did not need Rosetta, yet.

Thanks everyone - it’s good to know the transition to Apple Silicon seems to have gone relatively smoothly. I wasn’t intending on getting a new Mac until M4, but it looks like Apple are dropping support for Intel Macs quicker than many expected:

Still going to hold out for as long as I can tho…

After using thinkpads/windows later linux for almost 20 years I switched to Mac Pro earlier this year.

I will never go back. No issues.

Nice one Sebastian! Curious why you opted for the Mac Pro? Do you have a specific need for it?

I bought the first generation Macbook Air M1 when it was new.

Cons:

• if you need to use an old version of Erlang (before 22.3.something) it just won’t work. The earliest version I’ve been able to install using asdf is 22.3.4.26, for use with elixir 1.8.2-otp-22.
• you cannot run linux in M1 macs yet (but Mac OS isn’t too bad)
• I’ve yet to find a way to use my “normal” (non Mac) keyboards flawlessly
• not sure if related to this chip or the old versions I need to use, but compilation of Elixir project is slow.

Pros:

• lightweight, silent, and great autonomy (all reasons which made me buy it)

Overall 11/10, and I am no Apple fanboy (never owned an Apple product before that one)

It could be Spotlight indexing. Check out this Erlang and Elixir on Apple Silicon/M1 Chip - #61 by wojtekmach, and especially the very next post!