After spending about 4 hours of getting my new macbook pro 13" with M1 chip, 16G ram and 1T storage, I was successfully able to install a 100% arm64 ruby 3.0.0 with Jekyll 4.2.0 and was able to build 3 different sites I use Jekyll for. Everything is working smooth as ice and the performance difference from my intel based computer is astounding! My daily Intel dev box is an I7-7700k with 64g ram and 2TB nvme drive. The Intel box is water cooled, overclocked and setup as a hackintosh. So this is a MacOs versus MacOs comparison. Both machines are using 3.0.0 Ruby and 4.2.0 Jekyll.
Site 1 with about 75k pages showed Jekyll output:
| TOTAL (for 50 files) | 581972 | 2326616.41K | 122.383 |
On my Intel build time was 266.163 seconds
On my M1 build time was 137.644 seconds
That is about half the time!
Site 2 with about 11k pages:
| TOTAL (for 50 files) | 76023 | 136040.40K | 53.760 |
Intel: 98.872 seconds
M1: 63.269 seconds
Not as big of a difference as Site 1, but Site 2 uses a couple of custom Jekyll plugins I wrote to help with string formatting that is used all over the place.
I find it stunning that my Intel desktop with all the memory it has is so much slower over the little macbook pro 13 with 16g. I’ve tried to see if anyone was able to show such a comparison for the M1 versus Intel but only really saw people having problems with installing stuff natively for arm64. I was hesitant to invest nearly 2k (with 3 year apple support) for something so new and potentially problematic. I am so glad I did because not only is the M1 going to save me time every day I am working with Jekyll, it also frees me from having to sit at my desk to do the work.
So in conclusion I can say that I am very happy with the decision to get the M1 laptop and that I would recommend it to anyone on the fence about this like I was.
