Performance also seems really bad, with Xcode periodically freezing, and the whole system becoming so slow that the mouse cursor gets choppy. It seems WebKit crashes in a memory allocator, throwing EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (code=EXC_I386_INVOP, subcode=0x0) (Apple folks: FB8920323). Moving the simulator to the same architecture as shipping devices will be beneficial and will help find more bugs. Our tests mostly ran just fine, although I found a bug specific to arm64, which we missed before, as we don’t run our tests on actual hardware on CI. Apple’s last experiment with fanless MacBooks was the 12-inch version from 2017, which builds the same project in 41 minutes.
One can’t overstate how impressive this is for a fanless machine. For comparison, my Hackintosh builds the same in less than 5 minutes. Compiling the PSPDFKit PDF SDK (debug, arm64) can almost compete with the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro Apple offers (to date), with 8:49 minutes vs.
I bought a MacBook Air 16 GB M1 to see how viable it is as a main development machine - here’s an early report after a week of testing.
The excitement around Apple’s new M1 chip is everywhere.
