Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

Incident.io developers use MacBooks for their development work. When Apple released the M3 MacBook Pros in October, a debate arose about whether upgrading existing developer machines from M1/M2 chips to M3 would be beneficial. To determine this, the team collected build telemetry data from developer laptops and analyzed it using OpenAI's latest models. They concluded that the M3 is an incremental improvement on M2, but not enough to justify a significant price increase over the base M3 Pro model. Therefore, they decided to upgrade their M1 laptops to the base M3 Pro with 36GB of memory and wait for the M2s as they are performing well already.