I have a Lenovo Y700, which is a CPU beast of a laptop (built mostly for gamers, I believe). It's powerful enough to make working on my project feasible, and indeed when travelling, it is what I use, reasonably happily.
But most laptops just can't compile 800k lines of C++ fast enough to make them practical as a development system for that type of software, so the "type of dev" I am really does have something to do with it.
And yes, the new Apple laptops are not for me, which was my whole precise point, and (I believe) Gruber's point in that quoted text, however unintentional.
I'd take one of the Minis though, just to see how fast it really is :)
Fair enough, but it's probably better to compare the M1 to the CPU in your laptop then, no? Not the threadripper in your desktop. And in that case maybe the M1 IS for you, since I'd be willing to bet it outperforms your existing laptop. Assuming I've found the right computer, my existing (non-M1) Macbook Pro is beefier than your Lenovo, and it gets outperformed by the M1 too[1].
Just seems pretty disingenuous tbh. The argument that you need a seriously beefy threadripper machine to compile your code because you're an 800k LOC C++ developer falls a bit flat when you tell us later that you also compile code on your Lenovo Y700.
> Fair enough, but it's probably better to compare the M1 to the CPU in your laptop then, no? Not the threadripper in your desktop.
Although I appreciate the ability as a software developer to "work anywhere", if I was restricted to working only the Y700 I can guarantee you that certain development avenues would happen very differently, if at all. The laptop works fine as a machine to use "when I have to", but if I'm doing "deep" development, it's a PITA and makes me lose focus too much because of the delays in the edit-compile-test cycle.
I have absolutely no doubt that the M1 macbooks will easily outperform the Y700, along with most other computers I've ever owned.
It remains true, for now, that if you actually care about maxCPU (with a linearly parallelizable workload) (which I do for at least half of my development work), the current M1 machines are not the top of the line. I would tend to agree with anyone who suggests that this will likely change in the near future.
Ok, but again, this has really nothing to do with what kind of developer you are, it has to do with the fact that you are apparently not in the market for a new laptop.
Because if you were, the M1 laptops are the best in the market for the linearly parallelizable workloads you are talking about.
That's fine. But it really has nothing to do with what type of dev you are. Many more than just webdevs are happy to compile code on a laptop.
So yes, these laptops and intro level desktop are not for you.