Which MacBook for app development?

Woden · 29 Mar 2020 at 14:45

As title really. Not a serious developer, just a hobbies moving on from Python.

My current MacBook (posted about it a while back) is dying, I struggle to get it to charge, and it falls to its knees when I run Xcode or, for some reason, the sky go app. I want to replace it, but when I can get an i7 laptop with 16GB of ram, £1200 for a basic model MacBook Pro leaves a bitter taste.

So, how cheap can I be? Will an i5 with 8GB suffice, or do I need to up that? I just want to be comfortable running PyCharm and Xcode. If it is much more than that, I may well just get a Windows laptop and, later, and android phone for app development.

DanF · 30 Mar 2020 at 13:18

the new macbook air base spec with I5 quad upgrade should be fine for personal projects. Can bump the ram to 16gb if you are concerned with hitting limits. Compiling code usually just needs seconds to a few minutes of burst performance, it's not really a high CPU sustained activity.

Woden · 30 Mar 2020 at 21:47

To

DanF said:
the new macbook air base spec with I5 quad upgrade should be fine for personal projects. Can bump the ram to 16gb if you are concerned with hitting limits. Compiling code usually just needs seconds to a few minutes of burst performance, it's not really a high CPU sustained activity.

To be fair 16GB is probably overkill. I suppose it depends on how well I do for overtime this month. If I get £200 I’ll get the upgrade heh

DanF · 31 Mar 2020 at 10:01

yeah, I made my current companies entire cloud infrastructure setup using an old 2015 MBP with base dual core cpu and 8gb ram. Devops stuff usually has lower requirements than programming though.
It also ran several coding side projects with no issues, that was a combination of jetbrains rider (c# version of pycharm) and vscode. It would start to chug with larger projects or anything with multiple containers.

Cromulent · 6 Apr 2020 at 20:35

App and game development is what I am looking to do with my new Mac, but I want to wait a bit first as I also run virtual machines, so I need more than 16GB of RAM. I have my eye on the 16" MBP but still thinking about whether I want to get it or not.