Is the base model Macbook Air enough for Swift 5 / iOS development?

[TomOSeven]

Hi all,

I'm trying to make a change away from web development and I want to get started with iOS development.

However, the 13" MacBook Pro isn't really all that appealing to me this time around and the 16" one is a bit out of my price range right now.

It's also really hard to buy used, since all the models from 2016 to 2019 had the terrible, error prone keyboard.

Do you think the Air will do for now, until maybe a more affordable 16" MBP with Apple ARM chips comes around?

Does the Air have the same problem that it the fans go nuts once you've attached an external monitor?
I'd be using the Macbook on my desk attached to 27" 1920x1200 USB-C monitor half of the time.

It's hard to gauge how much processing power developing iOS apps really needs...

Thanks for any advice!

 

[casperes1996]

So the reason the fans go at higher RPMs when you attack a monitor to the 16" model is that it can no longer use the Intel iGPU but must constantly be using the Radeon GPU. - Devices with just the iGPU won't have that trait.

As for enough; What you need is based on what code you write. Obviously if you're writing code that needs to ready up a high end machine learning model before doing inference on iOS; You might want more power. - If you're just developing Hello World... You could do it on a potato.

But really I'd say that most things you're likely to be doing will be perfectly fine. And the things that could slow you down in the realm of reason are kinda not that big a deal to wait for I think. Might want to get 16GB of RAM, but if you're thinking of upgrading to a Pro eventually anyway, 8 could be perfectly fine.

 

[CheesePuff]

The way I see it is, you're already spending ~$1K for a machine, why not invest slightly more to make your experience better by getting 16 GB RAM and the quad-core i5, which should be $300 more and allows for better performance when using an external display, compiling times, etc.

 

[0128672]

If you're just developing Hello World... You could do it on a potato.

🤣 👍🏻

 

[TomOSeven]

Yeah I'll give it a shot.

 

[synicalx1]

Out of curiosity, I took my MBA into work this morning and cloned our iOS app repo onto it (don't tell our security guy). I was very surprised at how smoothly it ran. I was able to build the app, fire up a simulator and use the app in it all without any majority slowness or issues other than the fan going ballistic for a minute or two. It's not a tiny either, the repo itself (minus certificates etc) is over 300Mb.

I think if I was dev'ing on a Mac full time I'd probably want 16GB of memory though, while Xcode seemed to run fine in 8GB I wasn't doing anything other than running Xcode. If I had Slack/Teams, a browser, a mail client etc all running at the same time I can imagine that 8GB would just vanish.

 

[aajeevlin]

The way I see it is, you're already spending ~$1K for a machine, why not invest slightly more to make your experience better by getting 16 GB RAM and the quad-core i5, which should be $300 more and allows for better performance when using an external display, compiling times, etc.

The problem is following your logic (and this is my own fault) I would just talk myself into a MacBook Pro 16. The whole it’s just another $200-300 logic is dangerous at least for myself.

 

[slooksterPSV]

I'm using the base 13" model and learning to develop iOS apps and learning Swift (all at the same time, weird right). Its not the fastest, but, it does perform quite well. I usually have the Safari with the tutorial page on the left, Books open, iTunes, Mail, Messaging, Twitter, etc. and sometimes the fan kicks on. Usually its only when doing the live preview.

 

[twintin]

I think if I was dev'ing on a Mac full time I'd probably want 16GB of memory though, while Xcode seemed to run fine in 8GB I wasn't doing anything other than running Xcode. If I had Slack/Teams, a browser, a mail client etc all running at the same time I can imagine that 8GB would just vanish.

I’m not running Xcode, but VS Code, with Slack, MS Teams, e mail, browsing, spotify etc. all at same time just fine on a base model with 8 GB (green memory pressure, max 6 GB usage). You have to push it way more than that before 8 GB becommes a real issue.