How fast does your MacBook need to be to comfortably code iOS apps with Xcode? Is a MacBook Pro from 2-3 years ago good enough to learn Swift programming? Let’s find out!
Here’s what we’ll get into:
I’ve answered a lot of “Is my MacBook good enough for iOS development and/or Xcode?”-type questions on Quora. A few of the most popular models include:
These models aren’t the latest, that’s for sure. Are they good enough to code iOS apps? And what about learning how to code? We’ll find out in this article.
Best laptop for programming in 2020: top picks for coders, developers and sysadmins. Apple rounds it all out with that incredible Magic Keyboard from the new 16-inch.
Since 2009 I’ve coded more than 50 apps for iOS, Android and the mobile web. Most of those apps, including all apps I’ve created between 2013 and 2018, were built on a 13″ MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM and a 1.3 GHz Intel i5 CPU.
My first MacBook was the gorgeous, then-new MacBook White unibody (2009), which I traded in for a faster but heavier MacBook Pro (2011), which I traded in for that nimble workhorse, the mighty MacBook Air (2013). In 2018 I upgraded to a tricked out 13″ MacBook Pro, with much better specs.
Frankly, that MacBook Air from 2013 felt more sturdy and capable than my current MacBook Pro. After 5 years of daily intenstive use, the MacBook Air’s battery is only through 50% of its max. cycle count. It’s still going strong after 7 hours on battery power.
In 2014, my trusty MacBook Air broke down on a beach in Thailand, 3 hours before a client deadline, with the next Apple Store 500 kilometer away. It turned out OK, of course. Guess what? My current MacBook Pro from 2018, its keyboard doesn’t even work OK, I’ve had sound recording glitches, and occasionally the T2 causes a kernel panic. Free online cad software. Like many of us, I wish we had 2013-2015 MacBook Air’s and Pro’s with today’s specs. Oh, well…
Sign up for my iOS development course, and learn how to build great iOS 14 apps with Swift 5 and Xcode 12.
When I was about 11 years old I taught myself to code in BASIC, on a 100 Mhz i486 PC that was given to me by friends. It had a luxurious 16 MB of RAM, initially only ran MS-DOS, and later ran Windows 3.1 and ’95.
A next upgrade came as a 400 Mhz AMD desktop, given again by friends, on which I ran a local EasyPHP webserver that I used to learn web development with PHP, MySQL and HTML/CSS. I coded a mod for Wolfenstein 3D on that machine, too.
We had no broadband internet at home back then, so I would download and print out coding tutorials at school. At the one library computer that had internet access, and I completed the tutorials at home. The source codes of turn-based web games, JavaScript tidbits and HTML page snippets were carried around on a 3.5″ floppy disk.
Later, when I started coding professionally around age 17, I finally bought my first laptop. My own! I still remember how happy I was. I got my first gig as a freelance coder: creating a PHP script that would aggregate RSS feeds, for which I earned about a hundred bucks. Those were the days!
The world is different today. Xcode simply doesn’t run on an i486 PC, and you can’t save your app’s source code on a 1.44 MB floppy disk anymore. Your Mac probably doesn’t have a CD drive, and you store your Swift code in a cloud-based Git repository somewhere.
Make no mistake: owning a MacBook is a luxury. Not because learning to code was harder 15 years ago, and not because computers were slower back then. It’s because kids these days learn Python programming on a $25 Raspberry Pi.
I recently had a conversation with a young aspiring coder, who complained he had no access to “decent” coding tutorials and mentoring, despite owning a MacBook Pro and having access to the internet. Among other things, I wrote the following:
You’re competing with a world of people that are smarter than you, and have better resources. You’re also competing against coders that have had it worse than you. They didn’t win despite adversity, but because of it. Do you give up? NO! You work harder. It’s the only thing you can do: work harder than the next person. When their conviction is wavering, you dig in your heels, you keep going, you persevere, and you’ll win.
Winning in this sense isn’t like winning a race, of course. You’re not competing with anyone else; you’re only really up against yourself. If you want to learn how to code, don’t dawdle over choosing a $3.000 or a $2.900 laptop. If anything, it’ll keep you from developing the grit you need to learn coding.
Great ideas can change the world, but only if they’re accompanied by deliberate action. Likewise, simply complaining about adversity isn’t going to create opportunities for growth – unless you take action. https://bestwup762.weebly.com/cleanmymac-v330-for-mac.html. I leapfrogged my way from one hand-me-down computer to the next. I’m not saying you should too, but I do want to underscore how it helped me develop character.
If you want to learn how to code, welcome adversity. Be excellent because of it, or despite it, and never give up. Start coding today! Don’t wait until you’ve got all your ducks in a row.
The recommended system specs to run Xcode 11 are:
Looking for a second-hand Mac? The following models should be fast enough for Xcode, but YMMV!
When you’re looking for a Mac or MacBook to purchase, make sure it runs the latest version of macOS. Xcode versions you can run are tied to macOS versions your hardware runs, and iOS versions you can build for are tied to Xcode versions. See how that works? This is especially true for SwiftUI, which is iOS 13.0 and up only. Make sure you can run the latest!
Pro tip: You can often find the latest macOS version a device model supports on their Wikipedia page (see above links, scroll down to Supported macOS releases). You can then cross-reference that with Xcode’s minimum OS requirements (see here, scroll to min macOS to run), and see which iOS versions you’ll be able to run.
Awesome! We’ve discussed what you need to run Xcode on your Mac. You might not need as much as you think you do. Likewise, it’s smart to invest in a future-proof development machine.
Whatever you do, don’t ever think you need an expensive computer to learn how to code. Maybe the one thing you really want to invest in is frustration tolerance. You can make do, without the luxury of a MacBook Pro. A hand-me-down i486 is enough. Or… is it?
Want to learn more? Check out these resources:
Sign up for my iOS development course, and learn how to build great iOS 14 apps with Swift 5 and Xcode 12.
Update: For those joining in late 2017, I've been hunting for a laptop with limited success. Read on for what I've settled on, or discuss on HN.
If you ask anyone who knows me, I’m probably the biggest Apple fan they know. Ask for a suggestion of what computer to get, and I’ll almost certainly either tell you the MacBook Pro, or to wait, because Apple is about to update its hardware finally.
But recently, I realized I’d gotten tired of Apple’s attitude toward the desktop. The progress in macOS land has basically been dead since Yosemite, two years ago, and Apple’s updates to the platform have been incredibly small. I’m a developer, and it seems to me Apple doesn’t pay any attention to its software or care about the hundreds of thousands of developers that have embraced the Mac as their go-to platform.
Take a look at Sierra: the only feature of note is Siri, which is half-baked as it is, and the things that did get ported over from iOS are half-done too. On the developer side? Nothing, unless you use XCode — the same story it’s been for years.
The only reason it’s still even viable as a platform for web developers at all is because of the incredible work the open source community does on the Mac toolchain (take a look at how easy it is to use Node, npm, Yarn or any of the other relatively new tools out there).
Bloomberg reported in late 2016 that Apple had dismantled the Mac team, rolling it into the iOS team, and it shows. The new MacBook Pros, released in late 2016, where interesting, but something of a half-hearted shrug in the direction of users: they’re okaymachines, but they sure aren’t interesting at all. Their hardware is underpowered, focusing on thinness and a gimmicky touch bar rather than power or functionality, the previous tentpoles of the Mac.
“In another sign that the company has prioritized the iPhone, Apple re-organized its software engineering department so there’s no longer a dedicated Mac operating system team.”
To tell the truth, I’m a life-long Windows user that grew to be disillusioned by Microsoft after Windows Vista. It was obvious the company had no strategy or vision, and while Windows 7 smoothed things over a little, Apple’s side had something I wanted: everything worked together nicely.
You could send iMessages from your computer or phone, answer calls wherever you were, and throw files to other devices with ease — and so I was tempted away in early 2013 when Apple released its second-generation 15' Retina MacBook Pro.
That machine was my first real taste of Apple’s world, and I loved it. Everything was designed nicely, and worked well together. Apple’s deep roots in Unix meant I actually finally picked up web development for the first time, learnt how to use the terminal deeply, and even gave back to some open-source projects.
But, about the time I joined Apple’s world, the company’s attention pivoted. The Mac was no longer important, as the iPhone, iPad and then the iPad Pro became the focus of the company. The message was simple: why do you even need a computer when a tablet and phone can do it all anyway?
As a result, Apple’s focus on the Mac waned: the hardware didn’t receive an update for over four years, and then OS X, once regularly updated with interesting features, now only receives the scraps from iOS. If you want to see this in action, check out iMessage on Mac: the flagship feature of iOS, iMessage stickers, barely works on Mac.
You started seeing this in almost everything: Airdrop, Apple’s much-touted feature that lets you easily beam files between computer and phone was my first taste of the company’s “just works” mentality — about 30% of the time it worked every time, and the rest of the time you couldn’t connect at all. Then there was handoff, the heralded feature that let you work on one device, then seamlessly move to another. I don’t know if I ever got it to work with any sense of reliability.
I'm out of apologia juice for defending Apple going with 4 USB-C ports on the new MacBook over a useful mix and keeping the MagSafe.
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