What specifications are needed for a good iPhone application development environment?

Question

I am going to buy a new Mac for developing applications for the iPhone (I previously programmed them at work on my iMac).

What do you think are the minimum and recommended specifications?

Is 2 GB of RAM enough for Xcode, the interface designer and simulator to run at the same time? What if I also launch a browser with 10 tabs and Photoshop with a few small images?

The fact that I did not find any recommendations elsewhere suggests that I have nothing to worry about, but being a student is a big purchase for me. I need to be careful.

Thanks!
Tristan

Answer 1

Xcode will work on any Intel Mac with Snow Leopard, one of our iPhone developers runs on a MacBook Air with 2 GB of RAM. Any new Mac available right now should not have any problems with it.

iOS Simulator starts up pretty slowly, regardless of the system specifications I found.

All of the above, if you run Photoshop at the same time, you will definitely want to increase the amount of RAM from 2 GB, but RAM is cheap right now, so there is no reason not to do that! You want more than 2 GB to do the correct job of Photoshop.

Answer 2

This is a very typical condition for my desktop. I can do it all on a Macbook Pro 2009 with 2 GB. Of course, it would be faster if I had more RAM. You should consider buying an OWC update, it's cheap.

Answer 3

In my experience, 2GB should be considered minimal, especially if you plan to open Safari and Photoshop at the same time. I am doing my development on a 4-year-old Macbook, which is almost perfect with the memory upgrade to 2 GB that I gave it last year.

I would say don’t worry about other specifications, but if you can stretch to 4 GB, you really notice the difference.

Good luck

Answer 4

If you can afford it, go with 4 GB of RAM and an SSD. There will be many Xcode compilations, the launch of the iPhone Simulator, test runs, simultaneous viewing of the StackOverflow and Dev forums in your daily life, and the SSD-drive will make it all much faster - you will be much more productive, and usually your time is the most expensive component in application development.

PS Unfortunately, SSDs are still not reliable enough - see there . Good backup plan.

Answer 5

I have been doing a lot of home development on the MacBook Pro 13 "since 2010. It is sometimes too slow for my purposes. An SSD can go a long way, although I'm worried about reliability.