All incident.io developers use a MacBook for their development work. When Apple released the M3 MacBook Pros, the team wondered if upgrading to these new machines would improve productivity and security. To determine if it was worthwhile, the team embarked on a data-driven analysis. They created a custom Go hot-reloader to track build telemetry from developer laptops and used OpenAI’s models to analyze the data. They found that the M2 Max outperformed the M1 Pro in terms of build speed. They also compared the M3 Pro and M3 Max and found that the difference was not significant enough to justify the higher cost of the Max model. They concluded that M1 users should upgrade to the base M3 Pro model, while M2 users don’t need an upgrade. The team also explored the impact of memory on build performance but found that additional memory did not significantly improve build durations.
https://incident.io/blog/festive-macbooks