Pros and Cons of Apple silicon for Elixir dev?

Using erlang OTP 25 and elixir 1.14 without any problems. Tests run like 6x faster than older Intel MBP. On the downside… the particular M1 MBP I got has a tendency to iBoot panic. I run docker all the time so I don’t feel any battery improvements.

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I had a few aging computers when the M1s came out. I sold off an intel iMac and a MacBook Pro and had the pocket money for two M1 minis and an M1 MacBook Air with some cash left over.

The Air is fantastic, even this far in. The only battery issues I had were when I had this deal with VSCode trying to reindex a codebase and running a little out of control, but that was within the first few months of the M1 release, and MS have long since created a native version of VSCode.

I have no complaints with the mini. It handles 2 28" monitors running at 3840 × 2160 with aplomb. The only pitfall I experienced was having to buy new HDMI cables that could handle the 60Hz refresh rate that the “retina” pixel density requires.

Any compatibility issues I had with needing to get into the plumbing of building libs from source have long been resolved for me through Homebrew, though your milage may vary.

No regrets. Absolutely capable machines.

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I have the Air and previously had an M1 Pro from my old job. I work without a monitor a lot (hence the aforementioned dock-hiding) and I much prefer the Air! I don’t notice any performance difference (though I should have mentioned before that I don’t develop with Docker) and a possible thing for some people: I found the edges of the Pro very sharp on my wrists on the Pro. Like, I generally don’t concern myself with such things, but it was a real problem. I do raise my wrists while typing but they are resting a lot while not typing. On the flip side, the builtin speakers on the Pro are fantastic (for builtins) which was nice when having YouTube videos on while cooking.

EDIT: I have the M1 Air, not sure what the edge situation is like with the M2.

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Goddamn, with the advertisement you gave, I went and bought myself a air M1 too.

The only thing I can say so far that is that I am impressed by the computing power this small device can output, compiling OTP while running on battery in about 15 seconds is so amazing that I couldn’t even believe it at first. Having worked previously with expensive hp and lenovo computers, it is strange to me that this consumer grade device can outperform by so much the “enterprise” devices.

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I got an M1 Pro shortly after they came out. It’s an amazing bit of kit - no regrets whatsoever. 20 real hours of battery life, took a year of use to run it hard enough to get the fan to come on, performance is amazing. It’s over 2 years old and still feels like new. Even that weird touch bar thing has grown on me. If only I could figure out how to make home/end on an external keyboard work the same as other operating systems. Maybe I should try googling it one day.

There were a couple of minor niggles getting Elixir up and running in the early days and it looks like these still come up from time to time, mostly related to the rosetta version of homebrew being installed, but other than that, it’s been pretty smooth sailing. I haven’t tried to get Nx up and running as yet.

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Very nice tool. I mostly use it so I can tap Caps Lock for Escape and hold it for Ctrl. You can do anything with it if you figure out its JSON config, lol. It’s not that bad and there is a lot of stuff online people have posted.

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I have used M1 Air and M2 Pro, Only thing I faced was that I could not install older Elixir versions through asdf. otherwise, It works really well.

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