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iOS

Choosing a mac for "iOS Development with Swift".

Hello!

My question is actually about the configuration. I need mac to start learning swift. But it must be as cheap as possible :) but, of course, enough to work quite comfortable.

I'm not going to work with 3d or physics-based games. Apps are going to be simple at least for the first time.

Thank you!

5 Answers

At a bare minimum if you want to buy a new Mac, there is the Mac Mini starting at $499, but I would recommend the $699 model as the specs are almost doubled for just $200 more. (https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/) You will need your own monitor to hook it up of course.

This will definitely be enough to run XCode and start learning Swift.

I would highly suggest that you take a look at the Mac Mini range! They are great and I develop in Xcode just fine on mine!

At the moment i use my 13 inch MBair for Xcode and stuff like that. Its Okay and you have the benefit of mobility. I think its not only a performance descision. All not to old Macs would do the job (for Coding).

The only thing is about the small display..... If you dont need the mobility at all or you can efford an additional Display go with an Laptop ... if you always code at home and want so save the Money i would say get something with more inch :-)

i just advice you mac mini (which is my current) ; it is cheap, screen size bound to you and have every think to study swift and maybe much more for your expectation trust me;)

Hi alexey,

For the price MacBook Air's are very powerful, have long battery lives and are very portable. I've meet a few developers using the 13" 256GB model and they love it, the ram is modular so you can always upgrade it which they did because of ram suckers such as Google Chrome but aside from that they left it stock.

For Xcode an Air will function perfectly, however my personal choice would be a 13" Retina MacBook Pro as it offers that bit more performance and of course those very crisp 2x graphics, but that's just me.