Question

I’ve been looking into a cost-effective way to get into iOS App development. I’m thinking games now, but I could go in a lot of directions.

I’ve got a windows rig, and found a VMWare solution. And although it’s possible to virtualize os-x on windows 7, I don’t like the idea of using that much memory and downloading an OS from a shady torrent site.

I found a used mini mac, running Tiger for only $200 on amazon. Specs are:

• 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 processor with 167 MHz system bus
• 512 MB DDR SDRAM (expandable to 1 GB), 80 GB hard drive, slot-loading
  Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW)
• Mac OS X version 10.4 Tiger, iLive ’05, Mail, and more included

It seems only XCode 2.5 runs on Tiger, you can’t update to 3.x. (Apple offers XCode 2.5 to registered developers)

So my question is — would it be worth spending $200 more to get Snow Leopard (which is compatible with 3.x)?

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Please define worthiness within at least a few of these criteria:

• Does XCode 2.5 have different performance than 3.x when compiled on
  iPad and iPhone?
• Are there any widely used/helpful developer
  tools that you miss out on?
• Would the performance of a used Tiger mini mac be painful to develop
  XCode with (not going to be doing anything other than developing on
  it, any comments about performance?)
• Would Apple reject you from the app marketplace for using the
  outdated compiler (I haven’t finished the 50-page manifesto that is the Apple Developer agreement…)?

Thanks to anyone who answers.

Answer 1

If it were me I’d try and find newer hardware. I’ve written some things for iOS on an x86_64 MacBook originally running Leopard, currently running Snow Leopard. It’s slow on both. I can’t imagine how slow it would be on a G4.

I think there might be a limit on what version of iOS the Apple App store accepts, but am not sure what it is. I do suspect the limit is greater than 1.x. :-).