Has anyone purchased the base M1 Mac Mini for development work?

I've bought the 16GB model, mainly for getting started with Swift/SwiftUI and the Apple ecosystem.

Things I've tried besides Swift/SwiftUI: Go beta 1.6 - supports M1, seems to work fine.

Erlang/Elixir - couldn't get Erlang to run on a first try

Node, Angular - works fine

Deno - not supported on M1 yet

.NET Core api/blazor - works fine

Godot - doesn't work

Docker Desktop (beta) - seems to work ok (tried it with dgraph and postgres)

VSCode - insider build supported on M1, runs ok

Coming from Kubuntu 2004, I feel MacOS is ok but certainly not better than Kubuntu. That said, the hardware is fantastic - the thing stays cool and is absolutely quiet. I'm also loving the fact that there is commercial software available (Sketch, Affinity Designer, etc.) and that Mac users are still willing to buy desktop software.

Not the Mac mini but I bought the M1 MacBook Air (with 8-core GPU and 16GB RAM).

I watched the unveiling of the new M1 Macs live and was so impressed I brought up the Apple Store immediately afterwards to buy one ... until I saw the 16GB memory limit, then I decided to wait until whatever comes next.

A couple of weeks later my wife crunched her laptop screen, so (after seeing tons of glowing reviews in the meantime) I decided what the hell, I'll buy one of these M1 things and give her my 2014 MacBook Pro.

I'm generally doing everything "server-y" or "Linux-y" on AWS these days anyhow, so my laptop usage has actually become less demanding over the past few years. I've read that Docker support is coming along, but I haven't bothered trying that locally (and probably hadn't used Docker on my previous Mac in over a year). So yeah, for me usage is generally Firefox and/or Safari and/or Chrome with dozens of tabs, Terminal windows, AWS Workspaces client and Messages app. Everything flies, as you'd expect.

I got a cheap Choetech USB-C dock from Amazon to do HDMI, Ethernet and USB-A, and that worked for a couple of weeks until it flaked out and the dock's USB ports stopped working. Now I'm stuck on the laptop screen until the new Thunderbolt dock I ordered arrives tomorrow (and hopefully works more reliably). But while I had them connected, the Mac seemed to have no problem driving my 4K monitor - my old MacBook Pro could do 4K at 30hz and it felt like it was struggling - this machine makes it feel like a breeze as I bounce between workspaces and apps.

In the 5 weeks I've been using the machine I have had 2 random-seeming hard crashes - the screen went purple for a moment and then the laptop turned off. When it restarted, it wanted to report a kernel panic to Apple. Not sure of the cause of the issue and haven't been able to replicate on demand.

So far I like the machine and am happy with it - it makes my (admittedly pedestrian) workflow feel much snappier, although I would have also been OK waiting for something even better if I didn't suddenly need to buy another laptop for the household.

In the latest episode of the ATP tech podcast, the developer of Overcast describes how his experience with his M1 MacBook Air prompted him to sell his $5000 iMac Pro and switch to the Air full time.

https://overcast.fm/+R7DWgCAKU/46:13

note that you said "development" and that's kind of vague… If I were primarily an iOS dev, I definitely would switch ASAP. If you're a web dev and your workflow includes a lot of Docker, I'd wait a bit.

No, but I bought the M1 MacBook Air and a 4K monitor with 7GPU/16GB/512GB configuration for full-time web-dev work with Laravel.

PHPStorm and VSCode have Beta/RC versions and run fine, and Laravel Valet's entire suite runs fine under Homebrew Rosetta. Everything is very fast, and the fact that this machine is completely silent and doesn't get hot is phenomenal.

Right now, I've downloaded the Parallels Desktop preview and installed Windows 10 ARM on the machine. Amazingly, I was able to play some video games through Steam this way. My family likes playing Lego Lord of the Rings, which is a 32-bit Windows game. Runs at 1080p Medium-ish settings on Windows 10 ARM through Parallels fine, which is incredible for how much virtualization and translation is going on.

(For anyone else installing Lego LOTR, I had to install DirectX 9 because Windows 10 ARM doesn't come with it, but then it worked fine.)

Also, this whole virtualization thing works so well, I completely forgot just now that I was replying on HN using Microsoft Edge... on Windows 10 ARM on my Mac. :)

EDIT: My Windows 10 ARM install had a new build to install, and to my shock it installed the entire new build of Windows 10 in less than 4 minutes. Complete build. At the beginning, it even went 0%->30% followed by a reboot in 5 seconds flat, which caused my jaw to nearly fall off.

I hate to be the guy who answers a different question, but I almost did. In fact, I had placed my order and decided to cancel it later. The shipping time was a component, but I just didn't feel like buying the first generation of a tech that's basically non-upgradable (when previous version were). I was going to purchase it to work on the iOS component of a project, as I'd just switched to iPhone, but later decided to use the money to get some equipment more immediately relevant to the project. I may still get one later, when and if they release versions with more memory.

MBP and I love it. The one drawback is that I'm a heavy user of Hasura, which means that I'm a heavy user of Docker which doesn't run locally.

The fix is that I changed my start script (spins up Hasura, create-react-app server, serverless local, ngrok, etc) to just SSH into an AWS box and run Hasura there. With ngrok paid this is very easy and is basically transparent to me at this point.

Happy to share code if you're interested.

I have the mac mini 8GB. I recommend getting 16GB because I recently clocked out the 8GB because of firefox + jupyter notebooks (plotly consumed like 6GB). Overall, it's been great but there are still things broken natively. However, the Rosetta(2) makes the experience seemingless. The biggest problem I have is remembering to isolate the x86_64 and arm64. For instance, having miniforge setup for Python becomes a PITA since one version is meant for the M1 natively and the other is the x86_64 build. But since I got my Mac Mini, I barely use my early 2020 MBA anymore.

I purchased the base model Mini M1 a few weeks ago. I'm using it for development of my macOS/iOS app.

So far I am enjoying it. My other machine is a 13" MacBook Pro from earlier this year (intel, the cheapest model) and the Mini is definitely snappier, even if it only has 8GB RAM.

The MBP would often stutter audio playback when I was doing anything CPU-intensive and listening to music at the same time. This would often require me to restart the coreaudiod process to get audio playing nicely again. (It's a really horrible OS bug.) But the M1 just chugs along. Xcode builds are much, much faster on this as well, making the write code/test and debug it feedback cycle tighter.

The only drawbacks I've seen so far are that homebrew isn't fully supported yet and Firefox will just get stuck if you leave it for a few hours, requiring you to restart it. Other than that, for my workflow, it's been working great.

Some potentially useful findings related to working with Postgres on an Apple ARM M1 MacBook Pro 2020 from a colleague:

https://info.crunchydata.com/blog/postgresql-benchmarks-appl...

Virtual Box will only run 32 bit versions of Linux. Some python scripts will run, others die. At least it is consistent in which is which but I'm looking to rewrite the python stuff in ruby

I've had the M1 MacBook Air for a couple weeks now and it's great. It's very fast and almost all of homebrew works now. I'm doing Go and iOS development. I imagine for nodejs/Ruby native extensions it might be some time before everything works natively, but Rosetta works great as well. They honestly nailed it.

Not the mini, but the base MacBook Air. I got this for my wife so it only has 8GB of RAM, but even so Xcode runs surprisingly well on it. I've had a few times where it's gotten really slow for a few seconds when I suspect it's swapping. Since it happened the first couple times I made an effort to keep only the basics open and it's been great.

Overall, it compares quite well to my 2016 Intel MacBook, it makes up for the memory issues by being generally snappier in most other places. I suspect a 16GB rig won't have these issues and would compare even better versus the i9.

I was considering getting a mini, but I'm going to content myself with using my wife's M1 Air until the next M series CPUs come out. I want to see what the next generation has to offer before pulling the trigger.

I bought the 8gb mini, haven't tried any dev work on it but have been editing videos using premiere. Mostly 1080p60, it's been awesome, some filters take a bit longer to preview than they do on my intel MacBook with amd gpu (my dev machine, node, python), but nothing to cause issues. I'm pleasantly surprised how well it works so far. Win 10 arm via parallels is a bit slower than I'd like but i don't need to do much in it to bother.

I bought the 16gb M1 Mac Mini and so far great. I have a work laptop though (provided by work/required) which I use for my paid work, so there's less pressure for everything to be bug-free out of the box. If it's your main work machine then (depending on what you do) it might be worth waiting a couple of months or so.

I am switching to one (not yet delivered) for my iOS dev work from a 2017 MBP. My main reasoning is price, and since my laptop mostly just sits in clamshell mode. I got the 16GB one, but can't imagine the 8GB will suffer for development work. I still do all my machine learning work on a PC

Will do in the new year for sure. My old MBP gave up the ghost after 9 years of loyal service and I need a Mac for some cross-platform targeting. Golang seems to be ahead of the curve here so I look forward to seamless builds once I get there.

I bought one when my Threadripper 2750 blew up (figuratively) and I didn't want to wait for the newer AMD chips/boards to be in stock. I thought it would be a good device to let one of the kids use for school-in-quarantine. That isn't going to happen. I bought the 8G mini, and I've yet to feel anything remotely like memory pressure even running Windows 10 in parallels and having 5+ sessions of VS Code open. I do web, Rust, Go and similar type programming. Just this last week homebrew reached critical mass and nearly everything one would need is available for the arm builds. I love this thing, quite unexpectedly. I'll buy a 16" arm mac when they come out for a portable version because I need a bigger screen than the 13"s have. Zero regrets and 100% surprise from me. I've been a pretty die-hard Linux on the desktop person.

I had too many issues with my last couple of Macs (various HW issues and screen issues) so I moved over to a high-end Dell laptop running Pop!_OS. Couldn't be happier. I may re-visit Apple one day, but I'm really liking my Pixel phone and Linux environment too much. I'm not a classic programmer, per se, as I do 90%+ of my work in scripting (Bash, Python) and maybe 5% other as the need arises.

I don't have a pressing need (have last gen Mac Mini) so I'm waiting and hoping for a 32gb version.

I tried my friends M1 MBP, I wasn't horribly impressed. The thing runs quick, but it sacrifices far too much to get there. I'll probably be sticking with Thinkpads for the foreseeable future, or at least until Apple makes a laptop that isn't so disposable. If this is Apple's attempt at coercing me into supporting ARM, it's a pretty weak showing.