I recently took the plunge and obtained a shiny new M1-powered Macbook Air. For those unfamiliar, last year Apple announced that they were now building machines with a brand new ARM-based architecture, making the switch from the long-lived x86 Intel architecture. This brought promises of amazing battery life, amazing performance, and terrifying compatibility issues. Now that I've been living with this machine for a week or two, I thought I'd recap my experience both setting it up, any gotchas or surprises along the way, as well as my experiences around how well the new architecture works as experienced through the lens of a developer.

Lesson 1: Rosetta Works, But Sucks Battery Like You Wouldn't Believe

Everything I've run through Rosetta has been flawless from a functionality perspective. Having said that though: anything run through Rosetta does seem to suck battery life. And not just apps that are normally CPU intensive. For example: I found that having Dropbox (which doesn't support M1), Itsycal, and Spectacle constantly running in my menu bar all seemed to have a significant drain on battery life. I've since switched from Dropbox to Sync, from Spectacle to Rectangle, and have uninstalled Itsycal as I still haven't found an M1-powered replacement.

Lesson 2: Which Apps Are M1 Ready is Really Random

So of these, which would you expect are M1 ready right now?

• Slack
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Visual Studio Code
• Sublime Text
• Dropbox
• Docker

If you answered the first three, then kudos to you, though until very recently (ie within the last week or so) VS Code only had M1 support via Insiders. It looks like Sublime Text 3 will never support M1 and ST4 is still a long ways off, which for a paid product used by a lot of Mac users is truly mind-blowing to me. The fact that Dropbox still doesn't have M1 support is just inexcusable at this point (particularly given it's an "always running" app). Docker has a preview version that's been out for some time, but full support still seems like a long ways off. Side note: I haven't tried the preview version, and I don't plan on it as there's been mixed reports on how stable it is (a positive take and a less positive take).

Lesson 3: Homebrew is Ready, but Your Obscure Package Might Not Be

With Homebrew 3.0, the popular package manager is now M1-ready. I can happily report that the vast majority of packages I use are M1-native. I installed python3, git, git-extras, bash-completion, pyenv, pipx, starship, the_silver_searcher, hugo, watch and a bunch of others without issue, and all seem to be M1 as reported in Activity Monitor.

So what happens when something isn't?

$ brew install hadolint

Updating Homebrew...
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 1 tap (homebrew/core).
==> New Formulae
bas55 delve geph4 kotlin-language-server latino libpipeline openmodelica oras sqlancer
==> Updated Formulae
Updated 267 formulae.

Error: hadolint: no bottle available!
You can try to install from source with:
  brew install --build-from-source hadolint
Please note building from source is unsupported. You will encounter build
failures with some formulae. If you experience any issues please create pull
requests instead of asking for help on Homebrew's GitHub, Twitter or any other
official channels.

I asked about this on Github and since hadolint is built with ghc and ghc isn't M1 ready (and likely won't be for some time) you either live without the package, install a separate Rosetta-based brew installation, or obtain the package from some other means (in the case of hadolint this is what I did: there are self-contained binaries on their Github, so I threw the latest in my path)

One pro-tip: this site is awesome for seeing if a package you're interested in is M1-ready or not: https://doesitarm.com/kind/homebrew/

Lesson 4: Homebrew Is Different Now

One minor gotcha I ran into is that Brew installs to a different directory: /opt/homebrew. If you have scripts (think things like .bashrc & the like) that reference the old brew path they'll have to be tweaked.

Lesson 5: Instant On is Amazing

This is a minor thing, and honestly I didn't think I'd like it as much as I do, but M1 Macbooks feature an "instant on" wake up from sleep. And it truly is "instant". Ie before I've completely opened the lid of my MBA the screen is already on and awaiting input. This even happens when I have an external display connected. Contrast this with my Intel-based Macbook Pro for work which takes a good 30 seconds to resume from sleep (often longer if I have external displays connected).

Surprisingly this meant I didn't bother installing Amphetamine on this machine since there's no point -- I don't care if my M1 Mac falls asleep as it wakes up so damn fast.

Lesson 6: Big Sur Is Less Good

This is less dev-orientated, but I really don't like Big Sur. The new Notification Center is annoying and just wastes space on my menubar. Toast notifications look much bigger on screen (so are more jarring). Lots of little annoyances with it, none of which are dealbreaking, but if I had my way I'd have Catalina instead of Big Sur on this machine (alas, not an option).

In Summary

This machine is awesome. It's expensive (as all Macs are), but is crazy fast, and (once you get rid of all your Intel apps) sips battery very lightly.

Docker is really the only thing that I miss at this point from turning this into a real dev machine. Hopefully full M1 support will arrive for that though I can't help but wonder if Docker will ever be completely compatible (if you build a Docker image on M1, can you run that image on an Intel based machine?)