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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

WoodenKitty
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5 Answers5

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That's a very typical state for my desktop. I'm able to do all that on a Macbook Pro 2009 with 2GB. Of course it would be faster if I had more RAM. You should consider buying an upgrade from OWC, it's cheap.

Jano
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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.

Scott
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In my experience 2GB should be considered a minimum, especially if you are considering having Safari and Photoshop open at the same time. I do my development on a 4 year old Macbook which is just about fine with the memory upgrade to 2GB I gave it last year.

I'd say, don't worry about the other specs, but if you can stretch to 4GB Ram you will really notice the difference.

Have fun!

Roger
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If you can afford it - go with 4GB RAM and SSD disk. There will be lot of XCode compilations, iPhone Simulator launches, test runs, with simultaneously browsing of StackOverflow and Dev forums in your daily routine and SSD drive will do all of this much faster - you will be much more productive and usually your time is the most expensive component in app development.

P.S. Unfortunately SSD still are not kinda reliable enough - see there. Have good fallback plan.

jki
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I'm doing a lot of development at home on an MacBook Pro 13" from 2010. For my purposes it feels a bit too slow at times. SSD could make a big difference, though I worry about the reliability.

Wolfgang Schreurs
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