My MacBook Air M1 is super fast. Now what?

Question

As a generic back-end services developer, my entire usage of this laptop can be summed up as the place where I run vim, a web browser, python, docker and compile go binaries.Any suggestions as to some killer apps to show off this super fast laptop?

onion2k · Accepted Answer

Two Electron apps at the same time?

Engineering-MD · Answer

It&rsquo;s less about the speed, and more about the silence. You can actually have a laptop run at a high speed but without that annoying fan background noise. That to me is the appeal more than pure speed, which is always limited by software bloat and other rate limiters.Otherwise get parallels, boot up Linux or windows and run some games which allegedly run quite well despite being in a virtualisation!

nunez · Answer

Install Chrome and start a Teams meeting and see all that extra speed disappear! /s
Seriously, I think people have been running games on their M1 to show how insane the SoC is.
My usual go-to is reporting how much battery I lave left after a long Zoom or Google Meet
Today, I did a two-hour Google Meet. No video, but it was in-browser (Safari) so the tab was still GPU-accelerated. 55% battery left. Started at 80%.

raxxorrax · Answer

I have an M1 Air and tried Blender. Works very good and rendering is surprisingly fast (I used x86 binaries, perhaps there are native one now?). The hotkeys need a lot of work since Apple keyboards are a crime against humanity.I don't use it for much productive work, only when not at home but the speed was indeed surprising. Not much worse than my PC.

mdp2021 · Answer

GIS, map rendering, can be surprisingly intensive. Then you show off your leaflet frontend. Not something one does on a laptop, maybe you do not have a terabyte to spend there, but supposing you travel a lot and you cannot prerender...I am exercising willpower to not suggest that it could run C&mdash; /J

touringa · Answer

The first thing I do with a new mac is insta-install all the apps I need at once. Here's the equivalent of Ninite for macOS...https://macapps.link/en/

coldtea · Answer

>Any suggestions as to some killer apps to show off this super fast laptop?Get some hobbies like music making with a DAW, video editing with a NLE, etc?

12ian34 · Answer

perhaps you could save yourself (or your employer) some money and downgrade to a >10 year old used laptop because it sounds like you don't need the M1? It also sounds like trying to find ways to "show off" the laptop may not be the best use of time, nor have the best personal/business outcomes.

Daedren · Answer

Reminds me of the people that buy a Raspberry Pi and only afterwards ask what to use it for.

rvz · Answer

I heard that the Macbook Pro M1X is super super fast.

My MacBook Air M1 is super fast. Now what?

As a generic back-end services developer, my entire usage of this laptop can be summed up as the place where I run vim, a web browser, python, docker and compile go binaries.
Any suggestions as to some killer apps to show off this super fast laptop?

Two Electron apps at the same time?

The first thing I do with a new mac is insta-install all the apps I need at once. Here's the equivalent of Ninite for macOS...
https://macapps.link/en/

>Any suggestions as to some killer apps to show off this super fast laptop?
Get some hobbies like music making with a DAW, video editing with a NLE, etc?

perhaps you could save yourself (or your employer) some money and downgrade to a >10 year old used laptop because it sounds like you don't need the M1? It also sounds like trying to find ways to "show off" the laptop may not be the best use of time, nor have the best personal/business outcomes.

Reminds me of the people that buy a Raspberry Pi and only afterwards ask what to use it for.

I heard that the Macbook Pro M1X is super super fast.