Question

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

Answer 1

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.