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Mucking About With a New 'puter

 (Curiosity Killed My Current Account)

Apple has killed my current account for the second time this year.  The first was when I spent my lockdown savings on an iPad Pro.  The idea being I wouldn't need another laptop.  The background to this is that Apple has, for the third time, radically changed the processors it uses in the Mac line.  This time, to a processor of its own design based on ARM.

As is normal for Apple, they held a big glitzy event that included graphs without numbers, promises of insane battery life and processing power beyond our wildest dreams.  Then, after an embargo period, the first print and YouTube reviews arrived showing the new models chewing through video editing and complex software builds like products that are i) usually larger and ii) usually quite a bit more expensive.

All this had me dangerously curious so I clicked Buy on a new MacBook Air.  I bought it to augment my five year old MacBook Pro.  The verdict so far?  I simply like it a lot.  It doesn't simply augment my five year old Pro Model.  It effectively replaces it.  I think the Air in particular is going to redefine expectations of a unit of its size and price.  Over the past week I've been setting it up and exploring how well it works in my areas of interest which, on a laptop, are going to be a little light software development, the usual productivity  and photography.  The story so far? Well.... 

Photography

Lightroom and Photoshop don't yet have native versions for the so called Apple Silicon so must be emulated through a translation layer known as Rosetta.  This turns out to be a pre-translation.  So, Photoshop took around 25 seconds to launch, first time, and then very quickly thereafter.  Once up and running, everything in Photoshop and Lightroom is noticeably snappy compared to my older laptop.  Actually quite a bit faster in use than the quad core, i7 corporate Dell (aka LGV).

Development 

My main concern with the M1 based Macs was the lack of Homebrew support in the near-term.  Homebrew is the package manager (similar to Yum) that Apple couldn't be bothered to provide themselves.  So, instead of Brew install <java | maven | whatever_else> I've had to work out how to do all this myself.  The good news is Azul Systems kindly provided a native Java from the start (though Java translated by Rosetta works perfectly well).  Visual Studio Code and Intellij both work perfectly.  For some reason, the Mac comes with Git supplied anyway, so no complaints there.  Google Chrome (native) works perfectly well with chromedriver (X86, translated using Rosetta).

The bad news? Virtualisation is out of the question for the time being.  It is quite likely that Oracle Virtualbox will never be a thing on the Mac/ARM platforms.  And when virtualisation is not out of the question, it's only really going to be useful on ARM based VMs.  Docker is a vague promise for the coming months.

One more drawback for development?  It seems the early models will only support one external display without some extra effort (well, the Mac Mini supports two since it has both Thunderbolt 3 and HDMI output).  Not a problem for me; I only space for one external display.   

Edit:  Between me writing that, and publishing, engineers in the open source space have made quite astonishing progress, getting both Windows on ARM and an ARM based Linux running under qemu.  Enough to make me slightly regret going for a base model. 

Productivity

Office (well, Word and Excel) both simply work after an initial Rosetta translation, as does Trello.  Teams and Zoom are also both working pretty well.  I've tested Zoom by using the MacBook to host the weekly virtual pub lunch with the team.  None of these are native at the time of writing.

© Jason Hindle

The photo?  Google Pixel 3a XL  

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