We were extremely excited to be moving our CI to Mac minis with the M1 chip and are waiting on MacStadium to release devices. Some simulators even make problems on iOS 14 an example of this is iPad Air (4th generation), which still emulates Intel, so try to avoid that one. Performance also seems really bad, with Xcode periodically freezing, and the whole system becoming so slow that the mouse cursor gets choppy. It seems WebKit crashes in a memory allocator, throwing EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (code=EXC_I386_INVOP, subcode=0x0) (Apple folks: FB8920323). Moving the simulator to the same architecture as shipping devices will be beneficial and will help find more bugs. Our tests mostly ran just fine, although I found a bug specific to arm64, which we missed before, as we don’t run our tests on actual hardware on CI. Apple’s last experiment with fanless MacBooks was the 12-inch version from 2017, which builds the same project in 41 minutes. One can’t overstate how impressive this is for a fanless machine. For comparison, my Hackintosh builds the same in less than 5 minutes.
Compiling the PSPDFKit PDF SDK (debug, arm64) can almost compete with the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro Apple offers (to date), with 8:49 minutes vs. I bought a MacBook Air 16 GB M1 to see how viable it is as a main development machine - here’s an early report after a week of testing. The excitement around Apple’s new M1 chip is everywhere.
