Mac Mini or Macbook Air & XCode

poadeleted21

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Aug 18, 2011
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I need to do some iThing development, will the 4GB model of the Mac Mini run XCode fine? I haven't done any XCode development since 2003... I'm a little out of date :) Should I consider the Macbook Air instead?

Was thinking of just plopping the Mac Mini down on my desk and KVMing it into my existing setup. I don't have a personal laptop so the Macbook air looks appealing but the hardware specs look suspect for doing development on.
 
I've only got the 2011 iOS Developer suite (haven't remembered to start the V5 download before I go to sleep). The disk space required is 15GB, which includes 4 GB of documentation and 9 GB for the iOS platform and simulator

Have you checked the Apple Dev site for memory requirements? I'm an iOS developer but haven't done anything in the past few months, which is why I don't have the current system.
 
I've only got the 2011 iOS Developer suite (haven't remembered to start the V5 download before I go to sleep). The disk space required is 15GB, which includes 4 GB of documentation and 9 GB for the iOS platform and simulator

Have you checked the Apple Dev site for memory requirements? I'm an iOS developer but haven't done anything in the past few months, which is why I don't have the current system.

I think for about $800 difference from the mini to the macbook air with 256GB, I'll go with the mini. I haven't been to the apple developer site since 2003 :)
 
I had an original macbook air with the 80G of disk. It ran Xcode fine but I ran out of hard disk pretty quick. I'm using a current pro for development now.
 
I'd get more than 4G RAM these days, my MBP was getting tight before I upped it to 8.
 
My MBP rarely goes into the top half of its 8GB of RAM. But I'm always out of disk space. ;)

For CPU-intensive stuff... more CPU is always good. I honestly don't know if XCode is multi-threaded but I believe it is. Can't remember.

Wouldn't worry extensively about the RAM. It's going to swap out anything not in use anyway, like all Unix systems -- and if you hit the point where it's thrashing on swap, the limiting factor then is disk I/O. Everything slows to a crawl. You'll know it when you need it.

Disk I/O is probably more important, especially compiling since its already going to be tossing temp files all over the place during that process.

Do they make a mini with faster drives? I haven't looked at the latest mini offerings.

Most machines these days are I/O bound. Mine is. 5400 RPM means I'm really waiting on stuff to get to/from the disk subsystem most of the time. I'm jealous of people with big SSDs. ;)

Plus, Apple overcharges like mad for both RAM and Disk. Go to ifixit.com and read their upgrade manuals and see if you're up for taking the mini apart. (Not particularly hard. But some folks freak out about warranty issues. Your call.)

A recent discussion of the Seagate hybrid spinning platter plus small on board SSD drives, for Mac use, seemed initially encouraging until a friend reminded me that OSX's filesystem is now copy-on-write -- so a predictive read cache for any changing data is generally worthless. Only the boot times look faster. Cute trick, Seagate.

The smoking deal in Mac a year or so ago was the iMac if you factored in the quality of the monitor. They were virtually at price parity with PCs if a true Apples to Apples (no pun intended) comparison was done.

Of course you may need to buy a suction cup at Home Depot if you ever need to work on it internally. (Nick is off playing daddy and isn't here to get all riled up about the suction cup to take off the glass. Haha!)

MacRumors (and others) have "when to buy" guide pages for tracking when hardware refreshes are due. Mini is listed as overdue to be updated right now.

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

These guys disagree apparently and don't like the iMac right now:

http://whentobuymac.com/

Don't forget Apple's Refurbished site if this isn't a "must be the latest and greatest" machine fresh out of the box. (If you must lick it, that is. Haha.) Many vendors also get caught with too much stock on the last model. Shop around a bit. MacMall and MicroCenter often have the previous version of some box on sale.

Just random thoughts. Probably not all that helpful. Dunno.
 
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