MBA 2020 for Cross Platform Developers

[wildspoon]

Hello everyone,

I am planning to buya macbook air 2020 i3 and 8GB Ram version. I code in flutter and I assume that fir IOS development, it will be just fine. What I am wondering is will it be okay to run an android emulator with this setup?

Sadly, 16GB ram version is not available in my country. I might upgrade it to i5 but I don't think to use it for more than 3 years and I am not planning to buy MBP, just for your information. Thank you for your help.

 

[casperes1996]

The Android emulator will run just fine. - I don’t know anything about Flutter, but I’ve used a base 2014 15” MacBook Pro for both iOS and Android development with Android Studio and Xcode - For the Android emulator to run smoothly the most important thing is actually just having the right processor IA extensions, which you would have with any of the “newer” Macs. More RAM can be helpful for big apps, but since I take it you’re not working on a massive Unreal Engine game or anything like that, it’s not really a concern, and assuming you’re not intending to run a billion programs on the Mac along with your IDE and emulators, 8GB will be fine. The i5 would likely be a bit faster for some tasks, but I honestly don’t think it’s something that would make that much of a difference to you. Noticeable, probably, but not that meaningful. Anything that gets the job done is a lot better than something that doesn’t and even with the i3 I’d say you’d comfortably get the job done.
Though you may want to close Google Chrome if you’re running both an iOS and an Android Emulator at once as well .
I’m sure you’ll be happy with the Air

 

[Falcon80]

Interested to know as well.

 

[wildspoon]

The Android emulator will run just fine. - I don’t know anything about Flutter, but I’ve used a base 2014 15” MacBook Pro for both iOS and Android development with Android Studio and Xcode - For the Android emulator to run smoothly the most important thing is actually just having the right processor IA extensions, which you would have with any of the “newer” Macs. More RAM can be helpful for big apps, but since I take it you’re not working on a massive Unreal Engine game or anything like that, it’s not really a concern, and assuming you’re not intending to run a billion programs on the Mac along with your IDE and emulators, 8GB will be fine. The i5 would likely be a bit faster for some tasks, but I honestly don’t think it’s something that would make that much of a difference to you. Noticeable, probably, but not that meaningful. Anything that gets the job done is a lot better than something that doesn’t and even with the i3 I’d say you’d comfortably get the job done.
Though you may want to close Google Chrome if you’re running both an iOS and an Android Emulator at once as well .
I’m sure you’ll be happy with the Air

Thank you a lot, it really cleared my mind.

 

[Falcon80]

Thank you a lot, it really cleared my mind.

Let us know how it goes when you start to use it