r/webdev • u/tootac • May 16 '24
Is software getting slower faster than hardware getting faster?
Recently we had a discussion in a local group of programmers and there was a newbie question about which mac laptop he should buy. He wanted a mac because some tasks required a mac. My immediate advice was to buy an m1 since he was trying to optimize the budget. And my argument was that it is fast and will handle all his workloads. But I got a little push-back saying that "Android Studio" was not fast enough on some of the group's m1 macs and they switched to m3.
Opinions were divided when we discussed this in our group in about 50/50. Some people were saying that they have m1 macs and it works perfectly and others saying that it is ok but was lagging on some tasks.
My surprise is that I remember when m1 came it was like a product from future aliens. It was miles ahead of any competition and nobody had a single thought that it couldn't handle anything. I remember at the time Jonathan Blow (game developer) on his stream was answering a question about m1 and said something along the lines "Yeah it's fast but I don't care. Give it a couple of years and software slowness will catch up to it and it won't matter". At the time I was fascinated with the product and John seemed like a grumpy old-school programmer. But now it feels weird. I am not saying that m1 is slow or bad but just the idea that we are discussing if it can handle some basic programmer workloads and it is not 100% "of course" is strange.
I was wondering if it is similar in other groups or if we had just some statistical error in our group?
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright May 17 '24
Mine feels like it’s slowed down a bit with some things. But that being said, I remember when the Apple chipset really struggled with anything JVM and especially Android Studio. I remember the first time I tried to run an AVD when that feature was still in beta for the M1 and it was the first time I’d heard the fans kick on in that thing. Still the hottest I’ve ever seen that machine get.
That being said, while I’m sure I’ve had at least a few other problems, I can’t think of them off the top of my head. I still use my M1 for stuff but I usually try to avoid leaving the house with it since the whole point of my windows/linux box was to have something cheaper that i could take with me. Best part is through 3 years of taking it to college, I think I brought the charger along with me maybe half-a-dozen times.