2012 MBA as a development machine?

dmelgar said:

I think people too easily succumb to labels. Label something a "Pro" machine vs. something that has an inexpensive base configuration and people label that an "entry level" machine. Actual performance is considered after the labels.

For my development, in many real world usage tests (not benchmarks), disk speed trumps CPU speed. An ultimate 2012 MBA will smoke a machine using a traditional hard drive. My new Mini gets 30-40MB/sec best case reading from disk. Whereas the 2012 11" MBA is getting 450MB/sec. Thats 10x the speed. Makes a huge difference. Compile time is certainly affected by CPU speed, but available RAM is more important to cache headers etc., and a fast SSD. And what about ancillary time that ends up being where more time is spent, such as starting the simulator, starting the app, starting tools such as Instruments.

I do extensive development on a 2010 11" Ultimate. I did many speed comparisons when I bought it compared to my 2009 MBP. The MBP had a much faster CPU, >2x. In some scenarios, strictly compile time was faster. But build and run time was faster on the MBA despite having a very slow CPU. It was able to launch the simulator and kick off the app so much faster that it caught up and passed the MBP for build & run time.

I've been debating upgrading to a 2012 11 Ultimate. It runs 2-3x faster for all tasks than my 2010, but resale value on the 2010 is in the gutter. Folks on eBay don't seem to know the difference between the 2010 base $999 machine and ultimate $1399 machine sometimes paying more for the base than ultimate. For now, my plan is to stick w the 2010. And even it performs ok for most development. I should mention though that I plug into a 28" monitor when at home.

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Bottom line

(a) So long as the internal hard drive remains fast (not too full), builds will run at top speed without any special effort; a RAM disk (risky in the event of a crash) offers no meaningful help.

(b) External eSATA does not help and a striped RAID actually degrades performance.

(c) Build speed scale closely with CPU clock speed.

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dmelgar said:

I think people too easily succumb to labels. Label something a "Pro" machine vs. something that has an inexpensive base configuration and people label that an "entry level" machine. Actual performance is considered after the labels.

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tomwilson said:

You'd be wrong, compile times are almost entirely CPU grunt. And my numbers were correct, i ran them many times. Who are you to tell me how fast my old macbook pro was?

Regardless, I have my new i5 2012 Air here right now so I can do a more appropriate comparison for this thread. My test is to do a clean and then build + run in the simulator, on two different reasonably complicated apps.

App 1 - 109 source files, tons of images:
2011 i7 iMac 3.4 Ghz - build from clean + launch simulator: ~7 seconds
2012 i5 11" Air - ~23 seconds

App 2 - 236 source files, less images:
2011 i7 iMac 3.4 Ghz - ~7.5 seconds
2012 i5 11" Air - ~14.5 seconds

Much better than my old MBP, but I still think the Air leaves a bit to be desired for a dev machine.

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theSeb said:

Which 2009 MBP did you have?

Build times are all about the CPU, and also the amount of available memory. Xcode caches your source files since they are relatively small and the speed of the storage makes very little difference. If you don't believe me, then check out the link below. The guy created a RAM drive (which is even faster than a SSD) and there was very little difference. Sure, a SSD will make things feel snappier, like opening Xcode and iOS simulator for the first time, but once everything is cached, then it's all about the CPU, especially when you have a sizeable project and are running automated tests with your builds (and you should be).

http://macperformanceguide.com/Optimizing-Build.html


Here is another example of what difference a CPU speed makes to build times. This is what happens when all of the other variables are kept constant with different CPUs:

Image

But, having said all that, is an MBA good enough to do iOS development as a freelancer? Yes. Is reducing build times better for your productivity? Yes.

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dmelgar said:

Not sure what you're arguing. I said in my post that available RAM is important. In fact, can me more important than CPU speed. I made the same point you're making about more RAM allowing the OS to cache.
No need for a RAM drive in Mac OS (Unix) world. Mac OSX will use all available memory as a cache.

Regarding CPU comparisons, it depends on how efficient the compiler is. XCode with Objective-C is very efficient. It can crank through thousands of lines of code amazingly fast. Of course there are environments that can be CPU intensive, video compression etc. so certainly some development environments can benefit from faster CPU. But in my case at least and other cases even when I was doing Java development, disk speed was a much bigger factor than CPU speed.

To tell an old story about disk caching. On worked on a complex project a while ago running a bunch of ant scripts, tons of Java compilations, webapp packaging. The build would work on either Linux or Windows. I could dual boot one machine in either. On the same machine, same CPU, same drive, same RAM, the build under Linux ran 2-3x faster than on Windows. Clearly because of disk caching, particularly write caching.

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barjam said:

I am a windows/java developer so have no idea but does Xcode parallelize the build?

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Simple just admit that you have no idea what you're actually doing or talking about and we'll call it a day... You are not the first and surely not the last programmer I run into who "thinks he knows what he's doing".

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The MBA is of course not an extremely fast notebook compared to other heavier / larger models, but it's mainly due to the fact that it was never intended to be a desktop replacement or something that could blow a MBP out of the water ( still it does a decent job at almost everything you throw at it )... but saying that the MBA compiles the same project 28 times slower ( the whole ~170 vs ~6 thing ) than your "GODLIKE iMac" is just dumb and it only proves ( yet again ) that you have no idea what you're talking about.

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tomwilson said:

Thanks for the personal attack. Very constructive.



- I never said the MBA was 28 times slower, I said my old Macbook Pro was, using one particular project. And it is. I can build that project all day long from a clean slate and get the same result. It's a kind of unusual project (has many images..), but really it doesn't matter what the project is, a desktop class computer of similar vintage is going to beat it at build times.

- I never said my iMac was godlike, you imagined that.

- My only point was that you can get away with a laptop but if you are going to do this *all day long* *as a professional* - you probably want something faster. I even said that it was more than enough to get started. I never meant to ruffle any feathers. You need to chill out

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kthomp said:

OP here Glad to see the thread is still generating some (heated at times) opinions. Good stuff. Thanks to all who have posted.

I've ordered the 2012 13" i7, 8 GB, 256 GB model - scheduled to arrive week after next (hopefully, it's earlier). Once I'm up and running with the stack and I have a feeling for how it's performing, I'll post my thoughts and observations.

Once again, thanks to all.

EDIT: FWIW, I've found disk I/O is a huge build bottleneck in almost all of the (non-trivial) projects I've worked on. Hence my hard SSD requirement.

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kthomp said:

Hello All,

I'm a Windows developer looking to make the jump to iOS/MacOS development, and I'm looking for some opinions on the viability of the following as a development machine: 13" 2012 MBA with 2.0 GHz CPU, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD.

Essentially, I would like to use the following software stack on my machine, with all software up at the same time:

- Xcode, iOS simulator, image editing software (GIMP and the like), browser, console, text editor, other miscellaneous lightweight programs.
- Parallels/VMWare running Windows 7/8 with Visual Studio 2010/2012, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, IIS, browser, text editor, console, other miscellaneous lightweight programs.
- Ideally, it would be nice to have Eclipse and the Android emulator also running at the same time (running in MacOS, not Windows under the VM), but that is not strictly necessary.

Do you think the MBA above would run this stack with good performance, and without any major slowdowns or hickups? Naturally, you will ask "why not use a MBP?" and the main reasons are:

- Cost: I want to minimize cost (note that 256 GB+ SSD is a must have).
- Weight: I want this as light as possible. I will output to my 27" monitor when working at home, but the lightweight MBA can easily go portable and I can continue to work on it seemlessly, which is awesome.

Finally, no gaming, video editing, or other sorts of intensive work will be necessary.

Many thanks for your opinions.

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