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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

They can probably out perform them, but only for a few seconds/minutes. That's why they put a fan in the pro.

Which actually sounds like a good fit for a dev machine, where you only compile once in a while, but do not sustain high loads

looks at 1-hour compile-test runs on a threadripper yes, of course, great fit.

It’s a great option for office work.

Need a day off? Have some errands? Hit the compile button.

lolwut. you mean let your CI/CD on a real computer/server compile it much faster so you can keep working?

Seems silly to do that compile/test on a laptop instead of a server.

Well they're advertising XCode so

if you have a server for on demand compiles why would you buy a macbook over el cheapo linux machine? besides vanity ofc

OSX and overall better dev experience?

Where's dmesg, kvm, namespaces, cgroups, and package management built in?

What about inodes and cpu spikes even running node on osx? Let alone doing that inside a container.

Nah. OSX is long gone for "better dev experience". Linux always wins.

Not at the company I work for.

On the one hand I'm kind of jealous, but on the other it's really fun :D

> better dev experience

what constitutes a better dev experience?

From just off the top of my head

- Same text editing shortcuts that work consistently throughout all apps in the system including your editor/IDE, browser, and terminal.

- iTerm2 having so called "legacy full screen mode" that I use exclusively. (I've been searching for something similar for windows/linux for quite some time).

- The general system polish and usability. This is not directly "dev experience", but it's something you interact with while doing development throughout the day and it's just hands down a lot better than anything linux has atm.

> - iTerm2 having so called "legacy full screen mode" that I use exclusively. (I've been searching for something similar for windows/linux for quite some time).

Is that about disabling animations? That can be done globally on windows and linux desktop environments.

No, it's about window being in a non-exclusive fullscreen mode. It's fullscreen, but at the same time can be on the background underneath other windows. Looks like this:

https://imgur.com/a/YNzcA0w

Essentially, I always have terminal in the background even when I'm not working acting as my wallpaper.

Ah, that's basically a frameless maximized window. It requires some tinkering but there are tools to force that behavior on other applications; for both windows and various linux window managers.

A mac server?

Which don't exist?

Exactly.

My compiles take like 8 minutes at worst.

You'd hit thermal throttling way before 8 minutes I'd guess.

A lot of my iPhone app builds are pretty quick though, < 1 minute.

I did a lot of development on a pixelbook. Things were mostly fine for development, but compiling took 2-3x as long due to throttling.

Our unit tests took around 30 minutes on a fast system though and were simply not worth running outside of the specific tests I was writing.

So if I understand they have the exact same chip in the Air as the Pro? Will better thermal make that much of a difference? Is there really that big of a reason to get Pro over Air at this point?

Better thermal will make a big difference for anything where you need high power for a long period. Like editing video for example. Anything where you need only shorter bursts of power won't make as big of a difference.

But better thermals will probably mean they can run the CPU in the Pro at higher base clock speed anyway, so it will probably be faster than the air all around - we'll have to wait for benchmarks to know for sure though.

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