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Comment by jonnycomputer | Hacker News Reader

So my 2012 MBP is on its last legs (love that thing). So now we have the M1, and I'm hearing impressive things. But my question is, as a developer who does, lets face it, pretty much the gamut, will I be handicapped in the near term? I use a combination of IntelliJ IDEs and Emacs, with MacPorts, and a large variety of open source and closed source tools. I just don't want the headache of having some part of my workflow cutoff.

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Same question here, except I disagree with all the discussion on other threads about "wow, 16gb RAM is magically sufficient for most use cases." I'm sure it is now sufficient for web browsing + IDE + Slack, but what about anything beyond that?

I realize 16gb RAM goes farther on M1 vs before, but some things just need RAM and there is no way around it. If i'm running a VM or multiple VMs (e.g., for android app development), or multiple docker containers -- I just need more RAM.

I'm hoping that the upcoming 16" MBP upgrade offers more RAM tiers.

In almost the same position (MacBook Pro 2013) and I plan on waiting for the 16". By the time that's out we'll see how many of these things are getting quickly ported - my expectation looking at how excited every is, is that things will get ported FAST. But there's time to wait and see before the one I actually want comes out.

MacPorts is working pretty well. About 80% in my testing. I've been able to work around anything that doesn't build. It seems much further along than HomeBrew.

Good to hear (for us MacPorts users!)

Well, at least Homebrew are claiming that "There won’t be any support for native ARM Homebrew installations for months to come." (https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/7857) so if you rely on a large variety of open source and closed source tools that might be a problem.

Almost everything works if you start terminal in rosetta mode. cmd+i on terminal.app and check the rosetta box.

Just had this discussion at work. We have a mix of MacBook Pros and high end Windows 10 laptops, and every one of them is running a VM hosting Ubuntu 18.04

Is the M1 going to have a VM capable of running a native Ubuntu instance?

Based on what people are saying here, it does seem that by the time the 16" comes out, support should be pretty good. That's pretty impressive, in a way.

MacPort isn't doing all that badly right now.

is this based on your own experience?

Not who you responded to but in my personal experience it is about 80% of what I've tried to build. I mostly had trouble with VideoLan x264 (but oddly not x265).

Yes.

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