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MacBook Air review
Signed-off-by: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website>
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title: "The Worst Experience I've Had With an aarch64 MacBook"
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date: 2021-02-15
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tags:
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- mac
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- aarch64
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---
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# The Worst Experience I've Had With an aarch64 MacBook
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I've had my hands on this M1 MacBook Air for a few weeks now and I have gotten a
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lot of opinions about it. I wanted to go over them and give my thoughts. This is
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an amazing laptop. Its battery life is iPad tier. I can run iPad and iPhone apps
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seamlessly.
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That being said, aarch64 macOS is still very much in its teething phase. Rosetta
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is nothing short of a technical miracle, it's amazing how close it is to the
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performance of running amd64 apps natively. As such, it's probably going to end
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up being the _worst_ experience that I have using an aarch64 MacBook.
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## Performance
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[This website](https://github.com/Xe/site) is a fairly complicated webapp
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written in Rust. As such it makes for a fairly decent compile stress test. I'm
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going to do a compile test against my [Ryzen
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3600](https://christine.website/blog/nixos-desktop-flow-2020-04-25) with this M1
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MacBook Air.
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My tower is running this version of Rust:
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```
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$ rustc --version
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rustc 1.51.0-nightly (a62a76047 2021-01-13)
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```
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My MacBook is running this version of Rust:
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```
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$ rustc --version
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rustc 1.50.0 (cb75ad5db 2021-02-10)
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```
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Building a development build my Ryzen gets this:
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```
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Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1m 00s
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```
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Doing the same development build, my M1 MacBook Air gets this:
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```
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Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1m 03s
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```
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And the MacBook didn't even get warm.
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Everything I have thrown at this seems to get about the same results. This 15
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watt laptop chip holds its own with desktop machines. I can only imagine how
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this will proceed as Apple advances their processor technology.
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## Apps
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With the exception of virtual machines, the M1 MacBook Air runs nearly
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everything I need it to. I have a Go compiler, Rust compiler, Nix, Discord,
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Slack, Telegram, text editor, image editors, chat clients and more. Some of that
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software is running in Rosetta and I am not able to tell when that is the case.
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The biggest thing that doesn't run properly on here is Emacs. I am able to get a
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version of it via Rosetta, however there are weird hangs that will randomly eat
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up all my input while I am in flow. This is undesirable to say the least. I've
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been using the aarch64 build of VS Code for the meantime, however I am really
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missing the native Emacs experience. Maybe a future version of [Emacs for Mac OS
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X](https://emacsformacosx.com) will improve this (or even make a fully native
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aarch64 build).
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Being able to run iPad and iPhone apps is also really nice. There's some
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constraints involved with having to emulate the touchscreen input, however
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overall it's enough to get the job done. I had to use
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[iMazing](https://imazing.com) to get installable versions of some apps I wanted
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to put on my mac (such as Skip The Dishes so I could get its notifications in
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the same place and Procreate so I could use Sidecar to draw using the M1's GPU
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power and extra ram), however they work well enough in general.
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It would be nice if more companies toggled the "supported on M1 Macs" flag. I'm
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willing to use a degraded experience if it means it's easier to access things
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that are otherwise exclusive to my phone (such as Facebook and my banking app).
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It would be great to use Netflix without having to open Safari.
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Something that really surprised me was how well Dolphin runs when you use a
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native build. I'm able to play Gamecube and Wii games at retina resolution and
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the MacBook doesn't even get warm to the touch. The amd64 version of Dolphin
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uses some Just-In-Time compilation that Rosetta can't emulate at all, however
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the aarch64 one runs a lot faster than it has any right to. It must be easier to
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translate binaries between RISC processor types or something. You have to build
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Dolphin from source when you do this, however it's worth it.
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## The Hardware
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I have written a depressing amount of this blog's content on a butterfly
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keyboard mac. The keyboard on the M1 Air is night and day better. It's like
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using an older MacBook keyboard without being forced to wear headphones to mask
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out the fan noise. I'm typing this in qwerty at the moment (I seem to have
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settled on being able to seamlessly switch between qwerty on laptop keyboards
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and Colemak Mod-DH on my Moonlander), but goddamn they really made the typing
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experience so much better. I wish I had this keyboard years ago.
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My previous MacBook was a 12" early 2018 model. It had 16 GB of ram (though 8 of
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it failed and became unusable somehow) and chugged doing basic tasks. It had a
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dual core processor and ended up being practically unable to handle more than
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basic code compilation. I shudder to think about how long it would take to build
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my website code on that machine. It also got hot. Very hot. I didn't even have
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to push it very far to get it so hot. The battery also started to go sour by the
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end of me using it. Overall I think it was a good purchase and I've gotten a lot
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of mileage out of it, but this M1 Air is so much better it's not even funny.
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## The Verdict
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If you are looking for a machine that is silent, room temperature, and capable of
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doing anything you can throw at it, look into getting an Apple Silicon Mac. This
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first generation is going to have the most teething issues; so if you don't want
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to deal with the jank that comes with a first generation product I'd probably
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suggest waiting for the M2 or whatever they are going to call it. I know it's
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certainly worth it for me, but I am not you and my needs will be different from
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your needs.
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This writeup was not sponsored in any way, Apple is not reviewing this post for
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content (and probably doesn't know that I made it). I am just a fan of this
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device and want to see aarch64 on the desktop succeed.
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