HACKER Q&A
📣 apfsx

Apple Silicon (M1 Pro) vs. Ryzen 9 7940HS (Gaming Laptop)


Has anyone transitioned from a Linux/Windows laptop to Apple Silicon as their main machine and could share their experiences? I’d really be interested in hearing any compatibility issues, troubles, or annoyances you’ve had. Particularly with your dev environment, Docker containers (x86), or building things that need to be deployed on x86 servers.

I’ve been using a 2020 ASUS G14 (Ryzen 9 4900HS / RTX 2060) as my main machine for the past 3 years. WSL2, Docker, the catalogue of Windows apps you can run from years ago has been pretty good to me but not without the occasional blue screens, loud fans, temperatures hitting 90C, etc. Considering a 16 inch MBP.

  👤 smoldesu Accepted Answer ✓
It's not going to be a straightforward choice, at least in my experience. Try both, see which works better.

However, I will say that you're not going to need a gaming laptop to get a good experience with Docker. My $300 Thinkpad idles under 30c with Docker open, mostly because I run Linux natively and don't use a dedicated GPU.

👤 IronWolve
Doable, but performance issues. If your going to run x86 containers will run slower and with more issues. And macs also crash when running lots of vm's like windows.

I'd say if your doing x86 dev, stay on amd. And then you get the bonus of the nvidia card for cuda for faster AI.

Or just use the mac as a front end dev, and put your containers in the cloud, and use the cloud for AI. More expensive, but get work to pay for it, or expense it.