[FE] Does anyone have any experience with web development on a 256/8 m1 macbook air?

Also, what's with the conflicting opinions about 8 or 16 gigs of ram?

Need to buy a new laptop and honestly I have no idea which one I should choose.

@molaram just for future proofing or have you experienced any slow down in workflow on your m1?

You do web? Get all the ram you have.

@molaram I don't do much heavy lifting here. Honestly for the next few months the most I see myself doing is running unit tests and watching YouTube videos while using vscode. That's the worst case scenario for me.
Hence the confusion on my end.

Why are you people talk about slowdowns, this is about space?

@nitwhiz discussing ram options.

Go for 16. My old laptop had a fucking i3 and the main bottleneck was the 8 gigs of RAM. Not only is it the only option for a future-proof laptop, you kinda need it for running containers and shit

I work in linux
I heard usa devs like to work in macs though.

Anyway... better 16 gb RAM indeed
And even that will be not enough, but with enabling additional 16 Gb SWAP in your SSD, it makes it good working pc.

Video card btw is useless in general. If you aren't machine learning or game dev.
In built into CPU video card is more than enough.

Well and I bought my pc without paying for windows.

It all made pretty cheap price for 420$ to get 16gb ram, 256gb SSD, Intel i5-10400 6 cores(12 threads)

With having external(normal) system unit it is quite comfortable to attach two same sized big monitors, 23 inch+ Which are quite cheap too, just 100$ each.

It makes perfect working place with minimum investment for best comfort.

Only 8GB of RAM, only 256GB of flash to distribute the writes, the flash soldered in, and a very swap-inclined OS - what could possibly go wrong?

Go for 16/512 if you want to go Mac. I'd only recommend 8 if you know what you're doing, and/or most of the heavy lifting is on a server or something.

@Fast-Nop that excessive wear seems to have been a bug with SSD monitoring https://extremetech.com/computing/...

My phone has 8gigs of ram even

@boomgoat yeah but swap?

I'd always go for 16.
Altought i got a pretty cheap notebook from Huawei with just 8 gigs of ram, BUT I setup a ridiculous amount of swapfile: 20gigs.

As the drive in there is fast enough, it works for me, the swap is used a good 20% nearly all the time I'm working on something.

@nitwhiz aren't you worried about the ssd wear issue?

@boomgoat there are quite good samsung SSDs with quite good health capacity, N times better than regular offers.

They should survive long enough intensive usage.

@darkwind that's true. One of the reasons I've stayed away from macs is the lack of changeable parts. You buy something and you're stuck with it. Honestly a thinkpad with linux might even be a better option.

@molaram good point ...
I was using a probook 440 g4 up till now. I'm not used to the concept of not needing to swap stuff out. Specially ram. 😅

@molaram hoping this next buy cures that itch for me. It's a completely new thing and there are so many mixed reviews about it that it just feels uncomfortable at the moment.

Most of the times when you go to get a laptop it's something tried and tested. This? This is something that's new to everyone.

@molaram new in terms of macbooks. Also yes, true that. The new improved version is another issue. 😂
If the change is big enough, this version will loose it's value. Fast.
Although, considering I fried my current laptop, and I'm on a budget, I believe my choices are limited at the moment.

@boomgoat i was worried about exactly that, and that's why it's a swapfile, not a swap partition. :)

@RememberMe Interesting news, thx!

@darkwind Normally, you just buy a large SSD and don't fill it up to the limit, then you have a lot of write capacity. My Linux laptop (as well as my desktop) has a 2TB SSD (500GB filled) because SSD space isn't expensive. However, Apple cut out the M.2 slot so that they can demand their insane storage prices at three times the market rate.

Then again, my laptop doesn't swap for now because it also has 32GB RAM - which the M1 can't even take, and 16GB are also very expensive compared to the usual market price.

@Fast-Nop that's the main problem. The pricing just gets absurd with apple.

@Fast-Nop also, 32 gig on linux? That's some hardcore future proofing you got there. I have a 16 gig machine running linux at the moment. The only problem I'm having is well, hp related. The realtec wifi absolutely sucks.
The Bluetooth doesn't work with the wifi.
The mic stops working absolutely randomly.
The ram. The ram doesn't reach 16 gigs even with three docker containers running simultaneously along with 20+ chrome tabs.

I have m1 mini with 8 . I use react native to build native stuff , no problem so far and so much faster than intel macbook pro

@boomgoat hp is the most sucking firm in general.

Recently brought their laptop... tried to install just Windows.

Got denied during installing start. No drivers for drive.

Tried to download drivers. Hp servers are down. Got lucky I downloaded correct ones a day before.

Installing Windows.... Nothing is working from external devices.
I needed to find exact windows 10 of 2020 may release (exact version is denied in drivers)

Only after that I got it working.

@boomgoat Changing the RAM option from 8GB to 32GB was just 160 EUR more, and I had 16GB already back in 2010 on my previous PC.

@javagrifter That's just normal when you replace yesteryear's tech with new stuff.

@rEaL-jAsE ....

@rEaL-jAsE in my opinion, yours might differ. Windows is shit for development. It's one of the reasons I switched to Linux. I'd stay on Linux but my machine just doesn't work well with it. So mac os for now.

@rEaL-jAsE true, but I had a horrible experience on windows. Primarily because of the half assed way windows uses linux sub systems to run an okayish development environment.

Wsl 2 was a nightmare.