What about everyone else? Well everyone else should wait. I am not saying don’t get the machine, especially if you can g

There are essentially three major developer types that can currently pick up this machine and be productive on day one. Apple developers, Python developers and full-stack website developers.,Those of you who are just as big fans of Flutter as I am, this thread is worth reading and following closely! Worth noting that once either VSCode or Android Studio have an M1 optimised variant out there, as long as you’re developing your apps with a physical device connected as the build target, you should be fine. Another interesting note: on the M1 Pro, building the demo Flutter app took about 5 times less than on my 15' 6-core Intel MacBook Pro.,Android development — this is similar in some ways to Flutter development, mainly because it relies on the same IDE, Android Studio to enable development. In other ways however, it’s actually much worse than developing with Flutter, and it comes down to the emulators. When installing Android Studio, you’ll realise the Intel HAXM acceleration support for Android is gone, because well, you’re not running on an Intel machine any more! The Android simulator is based on QEMU and M1 or Apple Silicon support in general does not seem to be a priority. Will it ever be? Your guess is as good as mine. You might just have to permanently move to keeping your build target an actual Android device.,Security is where I first ran into actual issues. As mentioned under productivity, 1Password while works, the setup may fool you into thinking it does not. However, I was less fortunate with Micro Snitch which reports the camera being turned on, even when it is not. Given that I have pretty much the same setup on the Intel MacBook Pro as well, I am fairly confident, it’s not a Big Sur but an M1 related bug.,Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Whatsapp also seem to work without issues — though none of them are optimised for M1 just yet. I had a two hour Zoom conversation on this machine just 8 hours after I purchased it and did not notice any hiccups. iA Writer also installed without issues and works as expected. Where I ran into a bit of trouble was 1Password. It installed fine up until the last step, where it claimed it cannot install because I was trying to do it on an unsupported machine. To my surprise though, I then started the app anyway, and ran fine, and still does.,Apple development — a resounding yes. And of course it is. If Apple didn’t make sure developers building apps for their ecosystem weren’t happy, their ARM move would have been dead in the water on day one. If you’re planning to use the M1 Pro for developing MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, TvOS or WatchOS apps, then this machine is fantastic, and likely THE machine you should get. Unless of course you want to support an existing Intel based app, in which case, you kinda need to hang on to your old machine too for those bug-fixes.,For many people productivity is a relative term, but for me it’s everything that has to do with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email clients, virtual meetings and the likes. The Office 365 suite works — or at least Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, do. Note that installation tends to stall at around 95%, but wait it out, it does eventually install. Having said that, getting them to install was unexpectedly troublesome, and the very first steps of the wizard tended to crash the installer until I decided to close other apps that were running under Rosetta 2. Perhaps the translation engine has a “bandwidth” it can handle?,Website development — if you are developing sites that use HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a way that it does not rely much or at all on Node and Node packages managers, you’re in luck. All of that works fine. Webstorm works, and so does Visual Studio Code. I’m clearly talking front-end development here. If you’re a full-stack developer relying on PHP or Python, these also work well. The former is unoptimised at the time of this writing, but the latter is fully supported by M1, both versions 2 and 3.,While I would consider myself a fairly creative person, I mainly use three applications beyond iA Writer, which I mentioned under productivity. These three are Apple Motion, Audacity and Photoshop. All work, though Adobe does point out, that the optimised version is something they have not yet released and importing images does feel a tad sluggish.,Cross-platform development — and what I am really talking about here is Flutter. This for me was actually quite important to find out and test. It’s a mixed bag, but the good news is, not for long. Android Studio while runs under Rosetta 2, it is as sluggish as a comatose sloth. Running Flutter with Visual Studio Code improves things somewhat, but I’d probably get a bit frustrated after a few hours of coding. There is an experimental ARM64 version that Microsoft is working on, but I did not install it. I managed to run the demo apps in the emulators, but running in the emulators pretty much any of my own apps I built over the last few months that rely on Flutter plugins, would have resulted in defeat.,My main browser is Chrome, but that’s mainly because I am a developer. Then I have a few secondary browsers such as: Firefox Developer Edition, followed by Safari and Tor Browser (which technically is still Firefox). Brave and Edge for Mac, I keep around out of sheer curiosity. Based on my tests, they all work, and I have not experienced any installation issues either, but worth noting that only Chrome and Safari have native support for the M1 chip. All the others run under Rosetta 2.,Web app development — this implies you’re heavily relying on the Node ecosystem, you use libraries such as React, Angular, Vue and all the other craziness that comes with linting, building and deploying web apps to the web. You may get away with running your React app locally. I certainly managed to do that, but for instance I had to rebuild node-sass. My gut feeling says, the more complex your web app is, the more you’ll run into problems. Docker support is also not there yet. Homebrew is another potential major blocker. If you absolutely need it, here’s where they’re at with it.,When it comes to entertainment, I am fairly basic, in the sense that I play no games whatsoever, so it’s just audio and video that I care about. Most of that is delivered via native Apple apps such as Apple Music, Apple TV. The one additional application I occasionally rely on is Plex Media Player, which installed fine and seems to work as expected — except for its mouse and scroll support which is flaky. It feels like the Apple TV app.,I left development for last, because there’s a lot to unpack here. It’s one thing to write simple HTML and CSS websites, and a totally different thing to build Apple or Flutter apps. The need for a virtual machine, like Docker, can also change the scene dramatically. I am fairly certain I will not cover all, heck, not even half the development types one would want to do on a machine like this, so I would love to hear the thoughts of those in the comments who focused testing out other types of dev workflows than mine.,Because I love hard, I hurt hard and deeply when someone wrongs me. Sometimes it’s frustrating and embarrassing. My therapist explained that it also means I experience joy for myself and others just as deeply. When I toured my good friend’s new house when they became first-time home owners, onlookers would have been convinced I had bought the house with them judging by my free-falling tears.