Title: The Wild World of Apple Silicon

Date: 2021-03-06 10:33

Modified: 2021-03-06 10:33

Category: Posts

tags: apple,m1,apple_silicon,applesilicon

cover: static/imgs/m1small.jpg

summary: A recap of my experience setting up my new M1-powered Macbook Air.

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.

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](https://www.sync.com/), from Spectacle to

[Rectangle](https://rectangleapp.com/), and have uninstalled Itsycal as

I still haven't found an M1-powered replacement.

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](https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/apple-silicon-native-build/54775)

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](https://blog.earthly.dev/using-apple-silicon-m1-as-a-cloud-engineer-two-months-in/)

and

[a negative take](https://twitter.com/mkennedy/status/1360318443661107210)

).

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

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

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/>

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.

This is a minor thing, and honestly I didn't think I'd like it as much as

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

on this machine since there's no point -- I don't care if my M1 Mac falls

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

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