Does anyone have any anecdoctal evidence around the snappiness of VsCode with Apple Silicon? I very begrudgingly switched over from SublimeText this year (after using it as my daily driver for ~10yrs). I have a beefy 2018 MBP but VScode just drags. This is the only thing pushing me to upgrade my machine right now but I'd be bummed if there's still not a significant improvement with an m3 pro.
If you're using an Intel Mac at this point, you should 100% upgrade. The performance of the MX chips blows away the Intel chips and there's almost no friction with the arm architecture at this point.
I don't use VSCode but most of my team do and I frequently pair with them. Never noticed it to be anything other than very snappy. They all have M1s or up (I am the author of this post, so the detail about their hardware is in the link).
I work on a team that does BYO devices. Some have arm/mac, but most are on amd64/other. This forced us to make our development environment cross arch, even though our production environment is amd64/Linux only.
Some challenges included Docker images being arch specific, old Terraform modules lacking ARM support (forcing an upgrade we'd otherwise defer), and reduction in tooling we'd consider for production. We generally worry about arch specific bugs, although I don't believe we've seen any (other than complete failure to run certain tools).
Kind of a edge case, but we were attempting to migrate from Docker to Podman, and found running x86 container images in Podman Desktop on M-series Macs to be unacceptably slow. Docker Desktop supports Rosetta 2 virtualization which performs fine, but Podman Desktop does not.
I have 2x intel macbook pro's that are honestly paperweights. Apple Silicon is infinitely faster.
It's a bummer because one of them is also a 2018 fully loaded and I would have a hard time even selling it to someone because of how much better the M2/M3 is. It's wild when I see people building hackintoshes on like a Thinkpad T480 ... its like riding a pennyfarthing bicycle versus a ducati.
My M2 Air is my favorite laptop of all time. Keyboard is finally back to being epic (esp compared to 2018 era, which I had to replace myself and that was NOT fun). It has no fan so it never makes noise. I rarely plug it in for AC power. I can hack almost all day on it (using remote SSH vscode to my beefy workstation) without plugging in. The other night I worked for 4 hours straight refactoring a ton of vue components and it went from 100% battery to 91% battery.
I have a rack in my basement with a combined 96 cores and 192gb of ram (proxmox cluster), and a 13900k/64gb desktop workstation for most dev work. I usually will offload workloads to those before leveraging one of these old laptops that is usually dead battery. If I need something for "browser tasks" (I am interpreting this as cross-browser testing?) I have dedicated VMs for that. For just browsing the web, my M2 is still king as it has zero fan, makes no noise, and will last for days without charging if you are just browsing the web or writing documentation.
I would rather have a ton of beefy compute that is remotely accessible and one single lightweight super portable laptop, personally.
I should probably donate these mac laptops to someone who is less fortunate. I would love to do that, actually.
Indeed. I keep around a 2015 MBP with 16GB (asked my old job's IT if I could just keep it when I left since it had already been replaced and wouldn't ever be redeployed) to supplement my Mac Mini which is my personal main computer. I sometimes use screen sharing, but mostly when I use the 2015 it's just a web browsing task. With adblocking enabled, it's 100% up to the task even with a bunch of tabs.
Given probably 80% of people probably use webapps for nearly everything, there's a huge amount of life left in a late-stage Intel Mac for people who will never engage in the types of tasks I used to find sluggish on my 2015 (very large Excel sheet calculations and various kinds of frontend code transpilation). Heck, even that stuff ran amazingly better on my 16" 2019 Intel MBP, so I'd assume for web browsing your old Macs will be amazing for someone in need, assuming they don't have bad keyboards.
My 2018 has a brand new keyboard and battery that I replaced myself. It's certainly still a good computer all things considered... but for a software developer, someone with means to afford a more modern box, I would def go Apple Silicon.
My 2015 Retina is running Arch linux as an experiment. That was kinda fun. I used it as a main dev rig for a few weeks years ago when the 2018 battery finally kicked the bucket.
I went the complete opposite of you. I enjoy being able run everything on my laptop, be it at home, at a cafe, at work or on the train. So I’ve maxed out a MacBook Pro instead. It doesn’t have 96 cores, but it’ll go head to head with your dev workstation and even let me play around with LLMs locally. Fans as usually silent, except when using the GPU for LLMs.
One thing that I could do with your rig though would be to start benchmarks to check for performance regressions, and then just put my laptop in my backpack.
Tailscale helps here. I run all my stuff remotely and just reconnect my shell with tmux, and vscode reconnects automatically. The only area this hurts is on an airplane. I was in Germany recently and still developed remotely using my workstation as the compute. It was super quick with no discernible latency. My laptop is essentially a dumb terminal. It could get stolen or run over by a truck and I’d be back in business after installing tmux and Tailscale.
I’ve replayed this pattern with other targets, too. For instance a system I maintain relies on a whitelisted IP in our VPC to interact with certain API’s at a vendor. I could proxy to that node and use that IP, but I’ve found it much easier to hack on that project (running on a dedicated EC2 node) by just vscode attaching there, using it live, and committing the changes from the end server running the system.
Being able to kill my laptop and know everything is still running remotely is nice. I rely on tmux heavily.
I don’t do much development but I have a fast Apple Silicon laptop in my office for mostly multimedia editing and some local LLM—though that’s also where I do development when I do. An old iMac in my office for video calls and a lot of web app work and and old MacBook in my kitchen for looking up stuff and when I want a change of scenery for web app work.
> It's a bummer because one of them is also a 2018 fully loaded and I would have a hard time even selling it to someone
I'd happily fix that for you if you want. I'd even pay shipping to take it off your hands. Anything would be an upgrade for my mom's old toshiba laptop ;) email in profile
If you find your compiles are slow, I found a bug in vscode where builds would compile significantly faster when the status bar and panel are hidden. Compiles that took 20s would take 4s with those panels hidden.
The 2018 macbook pros weren't even using the best silicon of the time - they were in the middle of Intel's "14nm skylake again" period, and an AMD GPU from 2016.
I suspect one of the reasons why Apple silicon looks so good is the previous generations were at a dip of performance. Maybe they took the foot off the gas WRT updates as they knew the M series of chips was coming soon?
I do regularly try VSCode to see what I’m missing.
VS Code has great remote editing that I do use.
However, on my M1 Pro 16”, VS Code is noticeable laggier than sublime Text!
Just clicking on a file in the side bar and waiting for text to appear has lag. Many non-nerdy people might think it’s instant, but I can see the lag clearly! LOL
For my tastes the VS Code UI is cluttered and generally feels slow. The extensions are great but also a nightmare of updates and alerts of things broken.
If it’s your thing, you can use CoPilot in Sublime Text through a plugin that actually works really well!
I’m on the fence about CoPilots benefits though.
Sometimes I’ll flick over to VS Code to use the chat copilot if I need an answer for an API call etc….
If I had to stick with one, I’m sticking with Sublime Text.
On my 2019 MBP, I found VSCode performance poor enough to be annoying on a regular basis, enough so that I would frequently defer restarting it or my machine to avoid the lengthy interruption. Doing basically anything significant would have the fans running full blast pretty much constantly.
On my M2 Max, all of that is ~fully resolved. There is still some slight lag, and I have to figure it’s just the Electron tax, but never enough to really bother me, certainly not enough to defer restarting anything. And I can count the times I’ve even heard the fans on one hand… and even so, never for more than a few seconds (though each time has been a little alarming, just because it’s now so rare).
It depends on what specifically you find slow about VSCode. In my experience, some aspects of VSCode feel less responsive than Sublime simply due to intentional design choices. For example, VSCode's goto files and project symbol search is definitely not as snappy as Sublime's. But this difference is due to VSCode's choice to use debouncing (search is triggered after typing has stopped) as opposed to throttling (restricts function execution to a set time interval).
I've got a 12700k desktop with windows and an M1 macbook (not pro!) and my pandas notebooks run noticeably faster on the mac unless I'm able to max out all cores on the Intel chip (this is after, ahem, fixing the idiotic scheduler which would put the background python on E-cores.)
I couldn't believe it.
Absolutely get an apple silicon machine, no contest the best hardware on the market right now.
