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Ask HN: Teams with mixed dev machines – Intel and Apple Silicon

by ko3us on 7/14/22, 3:14 AM with 3 comments

I head up an engineering team and im curious to know what others have experienced with having developers with mixed machines in their fleet.

My current team all have intel i7 based developer machines from 2015. They are working fine. However they are starting to show age.

Im employing some new employees soon, and was thinking of getting the Apple Silicon machines. However before I commit to that, wanted to know what challenges or issues I should be considering or being aware of when having a team that would essentially have two different architecture setups.

We do primarily web development and also do react native mobile apps.

We also have just migrated our core platform from .NET Framework to .NET Core.

We utilise docker too.

  • by themerone on 7/14/22, 4:04 AM

    I7 Mac's or PCs? I was recently issued an Apple Silicon Mac Pro as a secondary device. I personally find myself more productive on PCs or Linux machines, so you should take personal preference into account.

    WSL provides a very good Linux environment on windows, so the Unix toolchain is no longer a reason to pic a Mac.

    The biggest downside to developing on windows these days is abysmal git performance.

    Mixing VS Studio for Mac and PC might be problematic, so you might want to factor in the purchase or Rider licenses for the whole team.