MacBook Air review

Signed-off-by: Christine Dodrill <me@christine.website>

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+---
+title: "The Worst Experience I've Had With an aarch64 MacBook"
+date: 2021-02-15
+tags:
+ - mac
+ - aarch64
+---
+
+# The Worst Experience I've Had With an aarch64 MacBook
+
+I've had my hands on this M1 MacBook Air for a few weeks now and I have gotten a
+lot of opinions about it. I wanted to go over them and give my thoughts. This is
+an amazing laptop. Its battery life is iPad tier. I can run iPad and iPhone apps
+seamlessly. 
+
+That being said, aarch64 macOS is still very much in its teething phase. Rosetta
+is nothing short of a technical miracle, it's amazing how close it is to the
+performance of running amd64 apps natively. As such, it's probably going to end
+up being the _worst_ experience that I have using an aarch64 MacBook.
+
+## Performance
+
+[This website](https://github.com/Xe/site) is a fairly complicated webapp
+written in Rust. As such it makes for a fairly decent compile stress test. I'm
+going to do a compile test against my [Ryzen
+3600](https://christine.website/blog/nixos-desktop-flow-2020-04-25) with this M1
+MacBook Air.
+
+My tower is running this version of Rust:
+
+```
+$ rustc --version
+rustc 1.51.0-nightly (a62a76047 2021-01-13)
+```
+
+My MacBook is running this version of Rust:
+
+```
+$ rustc --version
+rustc 1.50.0 (cb75ad5db 2021-02-10)
+```
+
+Building a development build my Ryzen gets this:
+
+```
+Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1m 00s
+```
+
+Doing the same development build, my M1 MacBook Air gets this:
+
+```
+Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1m 03s
+```
+
+And the MacBook didn't even get warm.
+
+Everything I have thrown at this seems to get about the same results. This 15
+watt laptop chip holds its own with desktop machines. I can only imagine how
+this will proceed as Apple advances their processor technology.
+
+## Apps
+
+With the exception of virtual machines, the M1 MacBook Air runs nearly
+everything I need it to. I have a Go compiler, Rust compiler, Nix, Discord,
+Slack, Telegram, text editor, image editors, chat clients and more. Some of that
+software is running in Rosetta and I am not able to tell when that is the case.
+
+The biggest thing that doesn't run properly on here is Emacs. I am able to get a
+version of it via Rosetta, however there are weird hangs that will randomly eat
+up all my input while I am in flow. This is undesirable to say the least. I've
+been using the aarch64 build of VS Code for the meantime, however I am really
+missing the native Emacs experience. Maybe a future version of [Emacs for Mac OS
+X](https://emacsformacosx.com) will improve this (or even make a fully native
+aarch64 build).
+
+Being able to run iPad and iPhone apps is also really nice. There's some
+constraints involved with having to emulate the touchscreen input, however
+overall it's enough to get the job done. I had to use
+[iMazing](https://imazing.com) to get installable versions of some apps I wanted
+to put on my mac (such as Skip The Dishes so I could get its notifications in
+the same place and Procreate so I could use Sidecar to draw using the M1's GPU
+power and extra ram), however they work well enough in general. 
+
+It would be nice if more companies toggled the "supported on M1 Macs" flag. I'm
+willing to use a degraded experience if it means it's easier to access things
+that are otherwise exclusive to my phone (such as Facebook and my banking app).
+It would be great to use Netflix without having to open Safari.
+
+Something that really surprised me was how well Dolphin runs when you use a
+native build. I'm able to play Gamecube and Wii games at retina resolution and
+the MacBook doesn't even get warm to the touch. The amd64 version of Dolphin
+uses some Just-In-Time compilation that Rosetta can't emulate at all, however
+the aarch64 one runs a lot faster than it has any right to. It must be easier to
+translate binaries between RISC processor types or something. You have to build
+Dolphin from source when you do this, however it's worth it.
+
+## The Hardware
+
+I have written a depressing amount of this blog's content on a butterfly
+keyboard mac. The keyboard on the M1 Air is night and day better. It's like
+using an older MacBook keyboard without being forced to wear headphones to mask
+out the fan noise. I'm typing this in qwerty at the moment (I seem to have
+settled on being able to seamlessly switch between qwerty on laptop keyboards
+and Colemak Mod-DH on my Moonlander), but goddamn they really made the typing
+experience so much better. I wish I had this keyboard years ago.
+
+My previous MacBook was a 12" early 2018 model. It had 16 GB of ram (though 8 of
+it failed and became unusable somehow) and chugged doing basic tasks. It had a
+dual core processor and ended up being practically unable to handle more than
+basic code compilation. I shudder to think about how long it would take to build
+my website code on that machine. It also got hot. Very hot. I didn't even have
+to push it very far to get it so hot. The battery also started to go sour by the
+end of me using it. Overall I think it was a good purchase and I've gotten a lot
+of mileage out of it, but this M1 Air is so much better it's not even funny.
+
+## The Verdict
+
+If you are looking for a machine that is silent, room temperature, and capable of
+doing anything you can throw at it, look into getting an Apple Silicon Mac. This
+first generation is going to have the most teething issues; so if you don't want
+to deal with the jank that comes with a first generation product I'd probably
+suggest waiting for the M2 or whatever they are going to call it. I know it's
+certainly worth it for me, but I am not you and my needs will be different from
+your needs.
+
+This writeup was not sponsored in any way, Apple is not reviewing this post for
+content (and probably doesn't know that I made it). I am just a fan of this
+device and want to see aarch64 on the desktop succeed.