this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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I cba to find it but there was a tweet of someone saying that buying devs M1 Pro MBPs pays off in half a year from the shrink in compilation times. Some guy got snarky in the replies implying it can't be a very big project (in terms of the users and whatever) that OP's team was working on and it turned out to be the Reddit Android app.
I mean... the official Reddit app was so bad that they had to charge for API access in order to get real market share.
It was already significantly more popular than the good apps by then. The API access thing was to improve numbers further for the IPO. But the app is definitely big enough to have compilation times that can be bothersome. Doesn't mean it's a good app of course.
Sure, if you compare it to a thinkpad for 1k. M1 Macbook pros cost how much when they were released? 2.5k? 3k? Of you're going to get reduced compilation times. But what exactly is it "paying of"? How is the calculation from time to money done?
"I can store so much stuff in my RAM, it'll pay back in 6 months". Such a random metric.
A well specced Thinkpad is more like 2-3k. Calculation from time to money is done assuming a 40 hour work week and the average salary of a software engineer in that team. The comparison was to an Intel core i9 MBP IIRC. And the comparison wasn't two laptops, it was replacing the year or 2 old ones for the new model, not accounting for resale value on the old ones even.