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But but Apple’s doomed now Alder Lake is here?
Really! Doom, da Doom doom doom. Zim is happy.

But really Apple isn't in that much danger. These new parts and processes from Intel are like three years late. And they break legacy software. (It's convenient M$ just released Windows 11 with support for them) Apple pulled off launching several new A-series CPUS, and M1, and M1Pro& M1Max in the time Intel has been woefully behind.
 
Join the club? We are doing exactly the same, replacing virtually all our Intel laptops with Apple Silicon. What development/design studio isn’t doing this? That would be news.

Apple is going to be killing it in the creator enterprise space with these machines.
 
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Twitter is a low benchmark. Most decent companies have a compile farm.
 
Turns out that Twitter was not the first example of buying these for engineers


It was 4 days later twitter decided to go the same route


 
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Performance wise, even the MacBook Air would do a fantastic job. As others have pointed out, this is probably mainly due to the normal developer multi screen setup.

I am personally torn myself. Simplicity of the MacBook Air or multi screen support (but I know that I need the latter- though two screens would be perfect and therefore only the Pro model is needed)
As I dig deeper, any attempt to go above 16GB RAM would mean a jump to $2K to start. No way I could sell my execs on that, even if I wanted to.
 
Funny, one of the first comments I made on here in regards to Xcode on my M1 Pro, was that I hit compile and did my usual, I’m going to make coffee move. I didn’t even get out of the room before it finished. I may need to move my coffee machine closer, the alternative is unthinkable :D
I was thinking the engineers will be pissed. Now they have to account for 50% more of their free time.
 
As of December 2020, Twitter employed more than 5,500 full-time employees (of course, not all of them are software engineers).
I can't fathom why they need so many employees. Do they do anything else than the Twitter app? why the **** would you need over 5,000 people?
 
Personally, I would like to see Apple bring some more macOS/iOS/iPadOS enterprise features and support to the software. I know there are 3rd party tools, and they do work well, but better native support for Windows domains would be a good start.
 
I was thinking more along the lines of engineers doing too many iterative builds (for debugging) and not enough time designing and thinking about their code.
I became much more productive at debugging after I started to think less and iterate more. The problem with thinking about your own code is that you are blind to your own mistakes. You are not thinking about the code you actually wrote but about the code you were supposed to write.
 
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Unlike last time IBM allegedly deploying lots of Macs, this time, it is literally impossible to install Windows on Apple silicon Mac, which doesn’t seem like a dealbreaker of any sort for iOS developer anyways. Though, how many machines? 9? Maybe twitter don’t even have many employees anyways.

Oh and, I smell an extremely strong taste of apple fan here. It frightens me.
why? Because someone equips their employees with the right tool to improve their productivity?

BTW, Twitter is a publicly traded company so it would be very easy to find out how many employees they have, according to LinkedIn ~ 7.8k, and sure, that is small compared to some large enterprises who unfortunately have to stick to x86 because of legacy apps ...

comments like yours are just mind boggling ...
 
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i want 20%

need a good marketshare for better third party support but i still want to be an elitist.
After five or so years Apple switchs to RISC-V, and all current ARM applications will be forced to update for native support again. The circle continues.
 
I became much more productive at debugging after I started to think less and iterate more. The problem with thinking about your own code is that you are blind to your own mistakes. You are not thinking about the code you actually wrote but about the code you were supposed to write.
The trick is to not rely on being more productive on debugging but on developing software that doesn't require as much debugging. If you don't think you can catch your own errors then pairing up with another developer to cross-review each other's code is a very good system, one that is used on many software development teams.
 
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Turns out that Twitter was not the first example of buying these for engineers


It was 4 days later twitter decided to go the same route

What else could they get for iOS development? It's a non story. Obviously iOS app developers' machines are going to be replaced with AS based machines sooner or later. These poor developers are going to compile their wares on laptops though for a while which, I guess, is OK for small shops.
 
I became much more productive at debugging after I started to think less and iterate more. The problem with thinking about your own code is that you are blind to your own mistakes. You are not thinking about the code you actually wrote but about the code you were supposed to write.
It's a tradeoff. Good software developers can figure out the right balance between spending time on the architecture/design and coding. If you start coding without developing the right architecture first, you may end up with a bad design which no amount of time spent on coding can fix.
 
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Yep, and that's what this all is about. M1 Pro/Max builds software as quickly as a fully loaded enthusiast-class x86 desktop CPU drawing over 200W, so it's an incredible tool for software developers.

Although I am surprised Twitter would choose the M1 Max, what do they need the GPU for?
They're probably getting the M1 Max for the 64GB of RAM and 3 external displays instead of 2 (even though 2 will be enough for 90% of engineers).
 
The trick is to not rely on being more productive on debugging but on developing software that doesn't require as much debugging. If you don't think you can catch your own errors then pairing up with another developer to cross-review each other's code is a very good system, one that is used on many software development teams.
That sounds like the usual "a programmer is someone who spends two weeks automating a task to avoid two hours of work" story. Thinking is slow. Going through code with someone else is slow. Iterative debugging is fast, but it's also mind-numbingly boring, which is why people tend to avoid it. Or at least procrastinate extensively while doing it.

Systematic debugging is much like writing tests. People try to avoid it, because it's boring and repetitive. They like to think they are clever enough that they don't need to do it. But it tends to be far more efficient in the long term than the alternatives.
 
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That sounds like the usual "a programmer is someone who spends two weeks automating a task to avoid two hours of work" story. Thinking is slow. Going through code with someone else is slow. Iterative debugging is fast, but it's also mind-numbingly boring, which is why people tend to avoid it. Or at least procrastinate extensively while doing it.

Systematic debugging is much like writing tests. People try to avoid it, because it's boring and repetitive. They like to think they are clever enough that they don't need to do it. But it tends to be far more efficient in the long term than the alternatives.
You should look into other development processes. There is a better way to write software than what you're describing. It's not a new or unique problem.
 
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