Is the macbook air 11" 2 gig sufficient for xcode development?

Question

i've googled this question A LOT and i get a heap of conflicting answers -- mainly by people who do not in fact own a macbook air and are just giving their opinions.

My problem is i was just given a macbook air 11" 2 gig ram as a gift, i received it just 2 days ago. I would like to use it an an iOS development machine (as i own no other mac) but i need to know if it will be sufficient for iOS dev. Many people who do NOT own MBAs say it is not sufficient based on their experience with MBP 2 gig machines; but the MBA has SSD and so swapping to disk is faster and so im assuming performance would be better than an MBP 2 gig. I have read some answers on google to this effect too.

I would like to know, from someone who actually owns a machine like this whether i should keep this machine for iOS development or return it to the shop within the 10 day return time period.

Another issue is the machine was bought at an overseas port (duty free in australia) and so returning it is not going to be easy or cheap.

Please someone who possesses a machine similar to this can tell me if xcode iOS development is OK or is a slow and frustrating experience?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It depends on the size of your development projects. If you project contains 50-100 files, it's OK. Maybe not very fast, sometimes even somewhere slow, but definitely OK. If you project contains tons of classes, complex data structures, etc. than it will be a problem.

(I've got this kind of MacBook Air for on-the-go development and very happy so far, but our biggest project is about 200 files, not so big.)

I've more complains about screen size (maybe because my primary machine is 17" MacBook Pro), but it's not extremely bad either.

So, it's not frustrating. If you need to code in the field (plane, train) — that's great machine. But as a primary one and for big projects... well, there are definitely better choices.

Answer 2

I use an MBA 11 4GB for iOS development running Xcode 3. The Activity monitor rarely ever shows over 2GB of memory wired, even with the Simulator and a lot more apps than Xcode on the desktop. Not sure about Xcode 4.

Answer 3

Kids These Days! When I learned to program, I wrote FORTRAN on a coding form then keypunched it onto cards.

Your MacBook Air should be fine for small to medium-sized projects.

I have a 1.83 GHz first-generation Early 2006 MacBook Pro with 2 GB. It has a Core Duo CPU, not a Core 2 Duo, so it is 32-bit only and cannot run 64-bit code. I've been using it for all of my Mac OS X, iPhone and Android development since I bought it in 2006.

I've been working on what is now a rather large iOS App. The builds complete in ten or twenty seconds. If you're going to do iOS or Android coding it is very unlikely that your codebase will get so large that compile times are a problem.

If you are building larger codebases for Mac OS X, there are lots of ways to cut down your compile times. See "Large Scale C++ Software Architecture" by John Lakos. Even if you are not coding in C++, much of what he advises applies to other languages.

I always turn off code completion no matter what IDE I use, even if I have a really powerful computer. I don't like it, and feel that it's a poor substitute for learning the APIs I'm working with. Thus the slowness of Xcode 4.02's code completion is not a problem for me.

If it is for you, you might try using some other text editor like TextWrangler or BBEdit, both from BareBones software. The Xcode text editor is based on the Cocoa text widget, which is SLOW! I don't have BBEdit but TextWrangler is blazingly faster than Xcode's editor.

Answer 4

The lack of memory is the only major issue.

Macbook Pro can handle 8GB of RAM. Macbook Air can only handle 4GB.

Answer 5

I dev on the 13 model, same RAM. It's my primary dev machine for a number of things, XCode being one of them and it's rock solid with very little slow down. It's not going to be as fast as a Mac Pro, it will come with it's own limitations but it shouldn't affect your productivity or ability to develop effectively on it.

Just don't expect to run XCode, Photoshop, Safari with 7 thousand tabs and Terminal searching for the next prime number or you may be slightly disappointed.