I have been using the M1 MacBook Air 13' 16GB for 1.5 months. | Alexander Isora 💭

I have been using the M1 MacBook Air 13" 16GB for 1.5 months.
Here is my experience working on this machine as a coding SaaS founder.

Speed
Aww yeah, it is lightning fast!
My daily setup: Postgres, VScode (+48 plugins), Sublime Text, Slack, Discord, Spotify, Thunderbird, Telegram, Chrome (+8 extensions), Firefox, iTerm, Figma, Alfred. All simultaneously.
Not a single freeze so far. Each app opens instantly.
My friend-pythonist is using an 8GB version. It works slick too.


Apps
As you know, there is a chip incompatibility issue. And there is something called Rosetta to fix it.
So I expected some problems with apps.

But in reality, I did not have to care about this. Everything just works. There is not a single difference between M1 and Intel to me

What went wrong
My biggest fear was not being able to launch my development environment.
When I typed brew install python@3.7 in the terminal I got this error: "python@3.7: The x86_64 architecture is required for this software.".
It instantly made me pale because this means I will have to carry 2 laptops to be able to code my product
The problem was solved quickly by upgrading the project to a newer version of Python. Thank goodness our dependencies did not mess up because of the update.

The next problem was nodejs v11 which was needed to launch the product locally. yarn start took ~2 hours (HOURS!) to launch. Each update took ~5 minutes to compile. The development process was awful. I got pale again
The problem was solved by moving to a newer nodejs version. Again, the dependencies did not break up. But the things could easily mess up because nodejs dependencies are complicated as hell.
Now it compiles instantly, yarn build takes 30 sec.

Keyboard
It is much better than the previous generations have. Apple has fixed it.
I can code, I can type emails, I can write stories.
It is not as brilliant as the old one from my MacBook Pro 2012, but still fine

Why Air, not Pro
AFAIK, the Pro version has these differences: better battery, better mic + sound, more ports (+2). I did not find these features significant enough to pay extra. And I also dislike Touch Bar.

#tools