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I'm going to buy a new mac to develop iPhone apps (previously been programming them at work on their iMac).
What do you think the minimum and recommended specs are?
Is 2 GB of RAM plenty for XCode, interface builder and the simulator to all run simultaneously? What if I'm also running a browser with 10 tabs and Photoshop with a few smallish images open?
The fact that I haven't found any recommendations elsewhere suggests that I have little to worry about, but as a student this is a large purchase for me. I need to be careful.
Thanks!
Tristan
869
To develop iOS apps, you need a Mac computer running the latest version of Xcode. Xcode is Apple's IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for both Mac and iOS apps. Xcode is the graphical interface you'll use to write iOS apps.
At least 8 GB of RAM, but 16 GB lets you run more apps at the same time. At least 256 GB disk storage, although 512 GB is more comfortable.
8GB is should be more than enough for most of your daily use (like surfing, mailing, music, videos, developer tools if you are a developer or if you are a photographer or movie maker then for your editing tools).
Xcode will run on any Intel Mac with Snow Leopard, one of our iPhone devs works on a MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM just fine. Any new Mac available right now should have no problem with it.
The iOS Simulator starts up pretty slowly regardless of system specs, I've found.
All of that being said, if you're running Photoshop at the same time, you'll definitely want to bump up the RAM from 2GB, but RAM's cheap right now, so there's no reason not to! You'd want more than 2GB to do proper Photoshop work anyways.
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