Thoughts on the new M1 MacBook as a Symfony developer

Ever since Apple launched their M1 MacBooks I’ve seen a lot of praise for them from fellow developers.

So after a lot of research and asking around I decided to get myself the cheapest model. Apparently there isn’t that much of a performance difference between 8GB and 16GB RAM (at least not for web development) and 7 GPU cores instead of 8 didn’t seem like much of a problem either.

Since not everything works natively with the new chipset yet I thought I’d give anyone interested a quick update on how installing my stack worked out.

Composer

No problems:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | phpsudo mkdir /usr/local/bin
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer

Homebrew

No problems either:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Got this error at the end though:

Warning: /opt/homebrew/bin is not in your PATH.

I have no idea if this warning would have given me any future issues, but I decided to just follow the top answer of the the first Stackoverflow result I found and add this to my ~/.zshrc file:

export PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH

Then ran:

source ~/.zshrc

PHP

I always use Homebrew and Shivam Mathur’s tap for managing my local PHP versions:

brew tap shivammathur/php
brew install shivammathur/php/php@8.0

Restarted iTerm, ran which php and php -v, all went well!

Yarn

No problems installing Node and Yarn:

brew install node
npm install -g yarn

Symfony CLI

I use Symfony Server for my local development:

curl -sS https://get.symfony.com/cli/installer | bash
sudo mv /Users/xxxx/.symfony/bin/symfony /usr/local/bin/symfony
symfony new test

Didn’t give me any problems!

Docker

I couldn’t get my MySQL containers to work but I found a great answer in a GitHub issue that seemed to fix the problem. All I had to do was define this platform:

services:
  database:
    image: 'mysql:5.7'
    # Add this line:
platform: linux/amd64

Besided that, no problems or whatsoever!

Adobe software

Up until now only Photoshop and Lightroom work on M1 natively and I must say, I’ve never seen Photoshop start up so fast!

InDesign made my laptop freeze though. Luckily the beta version with M1 support is already available and seemed to solve that problem.

Everything else

Encountered no problems installing these:

All good…

As you can see, no major issues with me. Just the opposite, I’ve never seen Photoshop start up so quickly or PHPStorm index projects so fast. It’s absolutely noiseless due to the laptop being fanless, the keyboard feels great… Truly an amazing machine!