It is not often I am blown away by a piece of hardware. My Hall of Fame features the 1991 Super Nintendo, the 1995 3dfx1, and the 2010 Intel's Serie 520 SSD[1]. This past month my 2021 MacBook Pro M1[2] joined the club.
Much has been written about the performance and the battery life of the M1. I won't elaborate on that. Even though these alone would warrant much praise, it is for my peculiar usecase that the machine shines.
I spend my time either writing code or articles. Linux is perfect for that. But every once in a while that OS eats my time. Spending time figuring out why fractional scaling broke after an update, why that Thunderbolt SSD won't mount[3], or why it won't print is nerve wrecking. These rare, yet ragging, moments make me miss MacOS X.
As a retro-gamimg enthusiast, I may need to use an emulator to study a game's internals. Inevitably, I end up needing to run Windows.
I attempted to solve my problem via KVM on a beloved Thinkpad Carbon Gen 9. It took me forever to get something running. Dealing with Windows 11 TPM requirements was a nightmare. And I never managed to have something stable. Not to mention the battery life was abysmal.
UTM works. It was painless to set up both Ubuntu and Windows 11 with a few clicks. I spent 1mn creating both VMs[4]. It allows me to have all three OSes a simple swipe motion away. Both Ubuntu and Windows run at native speed since they are virtualized instead of emulated.
The ability to share files in rw mode made writing and testing cross-platform mDNS software[5] something almost enjoyable. At the very least it gave me the satisfaction of iterating at maximum speed.
At this point, the M1 is a dream hypervisor. I wish I could freeze time on this setup. I have only two concerns.
For every extra cycle an hardware engineer can squeeze out of silicon, you will find a programmer adding one hundred cycles to their program[6]. In other terms, I fear that once devs figure out how powerful the M1 is, they will throw more "features" at it.
UTM is simple, lightweight, and easy to set up. It is gorgeous and a pleasure to use. Just browse their website[7], see the clean gallery[8], and read the useful setup guide. My fear is that something purchases them and we end up with a confusing mess of Enterprise flavors a la VMWare.
| ^ | [1] | SSD reboot your thinking! |
| ^ | [2] | My MacBook Pro M1 2021 specs |
| ^ | [3] | A Linux evening |
| ^ | [4] | Not counting installation time of course. |
| ^ | [5] | mDNS Primer |
| ^ | [6] | Remember when Photoshop opened in 1s on SSD? |
| ^ | [7] | UTM website |
| ^ | [8] | UTM Gallery |
