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Ask HN: My MacBook Air M1 is super fast. Now what?

2 points by fourthwaveska ↗ HN
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?

12 comments

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onion2k
Two Electron apps at the same time?
[dead] mtgx
They've said it couldn't be done...until now.
coldtea
>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?

Daedren
Reminds me of the people that buy a Raspberry Pi and only afterwards ask what to use it for.
mdp2021
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— /J

raxxorrax
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.

12ian34
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.
rvz
I heard that the Macbook Pro M1X is super super fast.
Engineering-MD
It’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!

mdp2021
Dear Engineering-MD, and those who think alike,

I hope you are acquainted with the Pentium Silver series (N5000, N6000 and variants). Thermal Design Power of 6 watts. More than enough power to do most of the needed.

Best Regards,

nunez
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%.

touringa
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/