The HN crowd is vast and active, so there must be a number of people with direct current experience developing iOS apps with the standard Macbook.
What are your thoughts?
The HN crowd is vast and active, so there must be a number of people with direct current experience developing iOS apps with the standard Macbook.
What are your thoughts?
7 comments
The main thing to understand about these machines is that the i7 CPUs are about as good as any other CPU on the market (aside from less cores), but they're fanless which means they rely on the case to dissipate heat, and so will thermally throttle during long-running high CPU jobs. They're perfect for short lived jobs, even multi-minute compilations, but will have a hard time getting through repeated long jobs that require long durations of high CPU.In short, great for bursty computations with longer idle times where the laptop has a chance to cool off.
For instance, I build brew packages, full llvm builds, even small ML models, etc, without problems, because the machine starts cold and there is enough time after the job is done for the machine to cool off again. My machine suffers on tasks like Docker+Kubernetes/minikube that run a constantly polling VM in the background that takes 25-100% CPU when running idle.
For instance, someone in this thread mentioned the iOS emulator might be difficult to run. This may not be true, so long as the emulator does not constantly use lots of CPU - if it just uses high CPU in response to input events, it will likely be fine.
Even though it's not an Xcode complaint per se, the single USB-C port has been a real sticking point. Took about 3 months and 5 purchases to find an adapter that would let me run dual external displays, keyboard/mouse, •and• charge at the same time. Magsafe 2 had its drawbacks but I really miss it.
It's slower than I'd like, so I do my daily driving on a desktop, leaving it for on-the-road sorts of work, which it's capable of doing, though the screen makes dragging from storyboard to code a challenge on occasion.
Luckily I located the original purchase receipt for the MBA11 (they required that) and it wasn't as bad a process to get made whole as I thought. It was a $1279 laptop (8GB option) and I'd definitely gotten my money's worth. It was, era-adjusted, one of the best products Apple has ever made, in a sea of lemons.
Anytime the FA comes through with the drinks, I put away the laptop as a matter of habit. Just isn't worth the risk.
Not thrilled about its shape (too box-shaped to put under the MacBook, but too large to put it anywhere else, and the fixed USBC cable on it is both too long and too short to comfortably connect it).
I find that Xcode is a little cramped on the notebook screen if you have all of the panels open, but if you can close at least one of them, there's enough room to work.
I only have 8 gigs of ram in the Macbook (I have a Macbook Pro I use as my daily driver with 16 gigs), and that seems to be fine with Xcode, as long as I use Safari instead of Chrome, and don't keep Android Studio open at the same time.
It basically maps cmd+123 to left/bottom/right panels. Even after upgrading to a bigger screen I keep using them.