On episode 268: A Tarnished Brass Age the ATP boys talk about the rumor of Macs moving to ARM and away from Intel chips.
If Apple does go this route I can only see one possible candidate for the switch: the 12in MacBook.
The 13in and 15in MacBook Pros could be a mistake to convert for all the reasons John outlines on the show. Most of the developers I work with at Agrian use 15in MacBook Pros for development. Most are backend developers. We don’t use desktop computers.
What kind of development do we do? Well, the backend is a mix of Ruby (RoR), Scala, a little .Net, and some Rust. On the client side we have a browser based application written in JavaScript on Ember and our iOS App is a mix of Swift, Objective-C, a small amount of C++, and a new library written in Rust that’s shared with the backend team. Basically our tools run the gamut.
I maintain two of our old .Net services so I run VirtualBox with Windows 10 and Visual Studio 2017 in addition to Xcode for iOS App development and all my other Mac tools; multiple terminal windows, SourceTree, Evernote, Slack, and BBEdit as well as multiple tabs open in Safari. Yeah, there’s a lot going on and my MacBook Pro handles it without batting an eye.
Add the MacBook Pro to the list of devices Apple needs to keep in mind when it comes to Pro users. Not all Pros use desktop computers.
It’s worth noting I’m still using the 2014 MacBook Pro I was given when I started work at Agrian. I recently opened it up and replaced the 256GB SSD with a 1TB model. It works great. I’m not sure I could do that with a modern MacBook Pro.
