Flutter builds are way faster with M1 machines: A comparison of VMs

TL;DR: M1 machines are astonishingly fast! For iOS builds (with caching), we see build time improvements of ~50% compared with the Mac Pros.

CI/CD with M1 machines

In November 2020, Apple released the M1 MacBook and, one year later, the M1 Pro/Max chips. Since then, we have all read and heard from other people about the crazy performance improvements.

So we know that M1 machines are fast, but should we use them in CI/CD to speed up our pipeline? To help answer that question, we compared the M1 mini, Mac Pro, and Mac mini for iOS and macOS builds with Codemagic. In this article, we’ll give you the facts and figures you need to decide if an upgrade is worth it.