Anyone Using MacBook Air M2 24GB for Developement?

I think you should specify development of what exactly? Videos? Backend Software? Front end? Firmware? Mobile Apps? Games? 3D assets?

I doubt there isn't already enough information and options online and via HN search about M2 Mac's used for development.

What you are going to notice is the jump from Intel to Apple Silicon. It's like living in another world.

I use M2 Air with 24GB RAM for Backend and frontend development using TypeScript and React. Also have a Redis and PgSQL running under docker compose. A couple of browsers running with 20-30 tabs open. Teams and a couple of office programs running too. Didn't face any issues.

Many people in our company use M1 or M2 Air with 16GB RAM for iOS, Android or Flutter development. No one mentioned any productivity issues as such.

Same machine with 16GB of Ram. Everything is great. No issues at all. Best dev machine ever.

Yes. It's fantastic—the best portable dev machine on the market. My only complaint is the bezel, but it's ignorable.

I use one with 16 GB and it's fine, 0 issues whatsoever.

I'm using a 24GB M2 Air running a development environment in Docker, and no problems here. Running several containers, MySQL, elastic search, redis. It feels really fast compared to a 2020 i7 6-core with 32 GB. It doesn't get hot. It's silent. Running the environment cuts battery life, though I still get around 8 hours on a full charge.

I've used an M1 Air with 16GB for over a year and had absolutely no issues whatsoever. I've never hit any noticeable throttling limit. It simply does not need active cooling, ever, IME.

What's your dev stack?

I have the M1 Air 16GB, and if I'm bimbling around in NodeJS and VSCode it runs fine, but if I need to do mobile work, the Xcode UI previews and Jetbrains IDEs cause it to run warm and throttle.

It's not slowing me down, but it does make it a bit uncomfortable to use on my lap.

[delayed]

> I am concerned about it being fanless and, thus, probably going easy to throttle.

I recently made the switch from a laptop with a modern Intel chip to an M1 and can tell you the difference is night and day. It can compile LLVM in half the time and you won’t even notice that the laptop is busy.

As alternative, from a review I read that new AMD chips are also pretty steady. Also no throttling in laptops.

My theory is that Intel has optimized for short benchmarks at all costs.

I use M2 with 24GB and in a nutshell, it's fantastic machine.

I do backend and frontend, most of my dev time is spent in terminal and browser. Before buying it, I was worried about being fanless and was considering the Pro. I'm so happy I went with the Air. It's light, the battery lasts all day with no problem: when I go for an all day out of office work, I simple don't even think about bringing the charger with me. And if I really need to charge it (didn't happen yet), USB-C works.

Docker is always on, occasional ffmpeg transcoding, some Rust compiling... the machine does not care.

I have a 16" 32 GB Macbook M2 and I generally feel 32 GB is too little for development tasks.

YMMV.

yep it's the perfect choice for dev in 2023. performance is off the charts and almost makes me quetion why the pro exists (yeah its probably for heavier workloads like video editing). if you're worried about fanless you can install some thermal pads for cheap https://9to5mac.com/2022/08/11/m2-air-thermal-pad-mod/ but you likely will not need to.

I am thinking about getting an M2 with 32GB RAM.

On a side note for back pain - have you tried acupuncture?

I had, 13" version. Wonderful machine.

The only downside, if you drown it in the rain, you'd need ti replace it.

I'm back to 16" 2019 intel with 64gb of ram, and it's very noticeably worse.

Can you detail your full specs of your current machine? you should be able to handle those tasks. Do you have a dedicated graphics card? SSD?

Have you checked activity monitor to see what the biggest culprit is?

[I now have M1 max, 64gb 14 inch - and don't have any issues. But previously I had Intel i7 mac, 13inch, 16gb ram - no dedicated graphics card and I never had issues with development, i upgraded for video editing]

I use my M2 Air 16GB for app development. Runs Webstorm, xcode simulator, node servers pretty smoothly. llama.cpp also runs fast enough. It runs some games okay (like KSP).

I have a dock & external monitor to switch between my Air and M1 MBP and I don't notice a difference in performance when doing the same tasks that I normally do, but games run smoother.

I have a maxed out 13 inch M2 air, it’s a great device.

I run docker, usually with local supabase, affinity designer, framer, many many open tabs on chrome, usually two open vscode projects with some js builder and tests running, TablePlus, gitkraken, slack and some other smaller apps. On top of that I do video calls with zoom.

No issue. It’s fast. Ram does get full, but don’t notice it. It gets warm but not hot, unless you really push it.

Not having fans is really amazing, the quiet.

The ThinkPad X1 Nano Gen 2 is lighter (960 grams), and I now often use one for developing when traveling that I had originally intended for giving external presentations (when not traveling, logging in to our 2 TB RAM group server is more fun).

I would say the MacBook Air M2 is superior to the X1 Nano in most categories, except (1) weight (it's lighter than my iPad, which since I got the Nano leave at home) and (2) keyboard quality (which is very important to me for working longer periods).

Macs cases and screens look more sturdy but when dropped seem to break more easily than the Lenovo cases and screens, despite the latter being made from plastic (sadly, this is reporting from personal experience, sample size N=3).

I am using the Pro version, "MacBook Pro M2 24GB 13-inch 2022". Backend and frontend mostly, several docker containers running constantly, several chrome and firefox instances with about 10s of tabs opened, DB tools (pgAdmin etc). All of this works great, battery life ~5 hours when doing heavy work, fans very very rarerly turning on, maybe few times over the last 10 months I was using it.

One issue I experience is that "Virtual Machine Service for Docker" is consistently sitting at 6gb ram. I am running in "linux/amd64" mode as I had some compatibility issues.

Another issue is that for some reason WebStorm sometimes works much worse than on linux which I used before the mac. As if WebStorm completely turns off some features (highlight, typechecking...) from time to time.

I have the 15" M2 with 24GB. It's fantastic. I'm mostly doing web dev, and was thinking I'd use GitHub Codespaces if local Docker didn't work out (either because of performance or because of arm vs intel issues), but turns out that Docker runs very well on the M2. So well in fact that it's pretty nice to do dev work locally again (I used to do my work on the dreaded 2016 MBP, butterfly keys and all).

So I can recommend the M2. The things I miss are more than 2 USB ports and to a little extent an HDR screen (the screen is good, but it's not as good as, say, an iPhone Pro or the MacBook Pro). I also haven't tried using it with more than one monitor, and I've heard that's not possible. I'm also not a fan of magsafe and would have much rather been given a USB-C cable to charge. I hope the new EU legislation kills magsafe but I doubt it (hot take, I know).

If you're looking at the 16" MBP, then you should probably go to an Apple Store and just try lifting it up first. It's super heavy. I wouldn't want to carry that thing around.

Is this much RAM really necessary or am I just turning old?

using an M1 air, only things i found annoying were encoding 4k video, cross-compiling entire nix system images from source, building react naive apps for android from an empty cache, and trying to run stable diffusion. you'll be fine with an m2.

work on your posture and core strength. eventually i carried the air and a pro for work.

I'm using a Macbook Air M2 mit 24GB for freelance SRE some and lightweight software engineering work as well. I'm also playing around with local LLMs, Stable Diffusion, some virtual machines, Kubernetes/k3s, docker-compose and I sometimes build go software. Haven't had it struggle even once, battery easily lasts all day and some more. It's the best laptop I ever owned.

Back pain is the important topic here. Regular cycling will help a lot.

It's rather overpowered for anything but games and video production.

I used an M1 Air with 16 GBs without issue for everything from Unity3D to multiple IntelliJ products without issue

I did eventually move to an M1 Max MBP with 64 GB of RAM, but that was mostly from severely underestimating the uselessness (for my purposes) of locally hosted LLMs: as you said, 24 GBs is plenty for most usecases

Yes, a 24GB M2 MacBook Air should be able to do this just fine, but your 64GB Intel MacBook should not be having any issues doing these things either. What happens when you say "it gets throttled"?

My 2018 15" MacBook Pro is only a 16GB model and would have no issues performing these tasks. I would suggest removing the bottom panel of your MacBook and cleaning the exhaust vents. Being an Intel model, it is at least 3 years old, and dust can certainly buildup in that time.

If that does not fix the problem, something else is wrong. Yes, the intel MacBooks run hot, but even today they should be able to perform well, especially with 64GB of RAM.

I personally use a 16" 2023 M2 Max MBP maxed out and it is honestly god like.

However a good friend of mine uses the latest M2 powered Air with 16GB RAM and a 1TB SSD (the 24GB upgrade so a stretch too far for him) and I have to say it is a damn good machine and I could use it without much trouble. It doesn't throttle nearly as much as you would think for a fanless unit. Obviously it isn't as fast and he does hit swap when under a heavy workload whereas I am yet to hit swap but I also have 64GB vs his 16GB.

So to answer your question. Yes I think the Air is an excellent development machine for 'up-to and maybe a little over' a "heavy-medium" development workload. If you're doing a lot on the machine then you will hit its limits for sure but if you're just running Xcode and a simulator or two, etc. or PyCharm and docker, etc. you will be just fine.

If you're doing anything GPU heavy it isn't a great option but other than that I highly recommend it.

However I suggest you look at the total price once you add in 24GB RAM and more SSD storage (at least 1TB imho) vs the 14" MacBook Pro. There isn't a huge difference between them yet the 14" Pro is basically as good as my 16" for most things. Especially if you can find a good returned unit on sale cheap via the Apple Refurb store. The machines are as good as new, same warranty, etc. Well worth checking out.

Upgraded from a maxed out 2015 Macbook Pro 15" to a Macbook Air M1 with 16GB of RAM. The new silent laptop is literally twice as fast in every metric.

Air: https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-air-2022

vs

https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-15-inch-retin...

Working in IntelliJ on a few Java projects (40k LOC) and a few Docker containers, works great. I've never seen it throttle outside of video games and when it does throttle it's by 5-10% so not much but then I'm just building web apps.

If your projects are bigger or if you have a front end open in say VSCode or WebStorm at the same time and more than quite a few Docker containers then I'd recommend the Pro - basically any Macbook with a fan.

Moving from an aging intel macbook to a modern m2 is a night and day difference, the passive cooling won’t limit you for most dev tasks you throw at it.

As for your throttling, I experienced massive throttling issues on a 2018 macbook pro 15”. Started out of the blue, and was so bad that I couldn’t even do 15 minutes of video meetings before audio and video lag and break ups set in. Lived with it for weeks, until I tried resetting the SMC - which worked like magic! Machine returned to its former glory. Worth a shot in your case as well.

Other things to try if the machine is aging, is to open it up, clean all the dust, and reapply thermal paste. It might be all clogged up depending on where you’ve used it. Aging thick thermal paste can be pretty bad as well.

Not a direct answer to your question, but I recently upgraded from a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro to an M1 MacBook Pro which I got a good deal on - 2k for a 16 inch w the max chip, 64gb ram, and a 1tb hdd.

I looked at the new air, drooled over it really, but when I found this deal I couldn’t justify spending about the same to get a fraction of the power.

When I bought the last intel mbp, i actually initially bought an m1, but at the time it was too tough to set things up. This was mid 2021. This time around it was a lot easier, though my stack might be a tad simpler these days.

Only 2 weeks in but I’m really loving this thing so far. Might be worth checking for some deals on m1 models if you can find them, I think there are still some new models circulating, though from what I saw of the airs it was mostly 8gb ram.

Meta: there's a typo in the last word of the title (an extra 'e' in "development"), might be worth fixing for posterity. Thanks.

Had M1 Max 64gb then moved to Air M2 24gb when switching a job. I do Java development mostly with IntelliJ and work with containers a bit. It's super fast. For most things it's faster than the old M1 Max for most things I tried.

Yes. That is the exact computer I use for work.

The only issue is that I have to sometimes fiddle about with some Docker images that don’t like ARM. Rosetta takes care of most of them, but there’s a few that are bothersome. Other than that, it’s basically perfect. That said, I’m doing web development. Nothing like 3D graphics or machine learning.

However, at this point I’d wait for M3. They should be coming in a few months. Guessing early next year.