You hear about the new M1 MacBook, you also hear that they are must faster than any other Intel MacBook. But is it faster for typical users only? Is it good for the developer, or worse? Should I upgrade now or wait for the next generation M1X? Let’s find out!

What is on the table?

Round 1: CPU Benchmark Scores

According to Geekbench 5, the new MacBook Pro M1 is 70% faster in single-core and 50% faster in multiple-core, but numbers in the paper do not always translate to real-life performance.

Notice that the M1 has only eight threads while the i7 has 12 threads.

Round 2: Gradle project build time

This is a six-year-old Android project I’m currently working on, there are 44 modules and 917 tasks that need to be executed. About 50% Java and 50% Kotlin contain many annotation processors like Dagger 2, Data Binding, and Butter Knife.

All dependencies are cached, --rerun-tasks is enabled, and the M1 uses native JDK (Zulu aarch64). See more details are in the build scan

Intel MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2019):

M1 MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2020):

If only execution time is taken into account, the M1 is 59% faster. Combine with initialization and configuration time, it’s 60% faster.

Why is the configuration time on the M1 faster? I’m not too sure, if anyone knows, please comment down below!

Final round: Temperature

During build time, CPU temperature ramps up a lot. I built six times on the Intel MacBook and seven times on the M1 MacBook. At peak, the Intel MacBook can reach 100°C while the M1 stops at ~70°C.

To me, temperature plays a crucial part because:

• When developing, you have to put your hands on the aluminum MacBook body (which is a highly conductive material). After two or three builds, your hands will get sweaty because of the hot surface. This causes a lot of distractions while coding. Because of this, I end up buying a separate keyboard and trackpad. 🙁

• High temperature = 100% fan capacity = more dust will be sucked into your MacBook, leading to a decrease in cooling performance which will lead to an even higher temperature. 🤨

• Imagine you are in a room with a lot of people and your MacBook puts you in an awkward situation because of the noisy fans.

Is MacBook M1 ready for Android development?

Android Studio ✅

The native ARM M1 build is available on the canary channel, in short: it works but it’s not perfect.

Gradle ✅

Basically, Gradle is a Java application, which runs on top of a JVM. There is a native JDK build provided by Azul which is also what I’m using in this test.

Android Emulator ✅

According to the Android Studio team, the Android Emulator works with API 30 and API S Developer Preview emulator system images.

Conclusion

The M1 MacBook beat Intel MacBook in every round, it has faster build time, the temperature is way cooler. But in software development, reliability plays a crucial part too. Most of the time, you want to focus on writing code instead of fixing compatibility bugs. When all development-related tools are switched to native ARM, MacBook Pro will become a great development machine that you can rely on.