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Comment by lakechfoma | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty over maintaining Linux on my laptop, Windows 10 in general, and most hardware coming from the "PC" side of the market. I'm also looking to get into iOS development.

What do I buy? I'm thinking the cheapest Air. I don't want to drop twice that for something that seems so reviled that they must update it soon. But can I do iOS dev on an Air? Are refurbed previous gen MBPs good quality for the price?

Do I wait till September and cross my fingers for an improved next gen that isn't $200 more expensive?

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I'm not sure about "good quality for the price", but the 2013-2015 rMBPs are quite good.

The 15" models have quad-core processors that will still stack up well vs the dual-core processors in many laptops today, and they maxed out at 16GB of ram - still the max in the current gen MacBook Pro.

2 years ago I got a 2013 model Macbook Air with 512GB SSD / 8GB RAM for app development. Turns out I now use it as my daily driver and I had preordered the original Surface Book. Being a Windows user something made me switch (first Mac with an SSD and an ultrawide monitor).

I basically leave it docked all the time. I really want to upgrade because I need more RAM and for video editing. But to give you an idea, I'm using it perfectly fine with XCode running docker containers with Mongo/Neo4j etc. Email, web and office stuff is no issue at all.

I paid about £940 ($1200) in Jan 2016. After all this time, I can sell it for £300 (30% of it's original value).

Ah that's pretty encouraging. I see an $809 model right now from 2015 with 8GB/128GB which is all I need for my current day-to-day.

I'm not even sure how iOS development works yet, but you think the <2 GHz processor is fine with the whole toolset? Any complaints at all? Like any CPU intensive aspects that get bogged down

I'd worry a bit about the 128GB SSD if you are getting this for iOS development. My Mac is at home (so I can't check) but the current version of xCode + iOS simulators/dev tools is in the tens of GBs (40 or so GB, IIRC).

I honestly think macOS + xCode + Office is really close to 128GB by itself, but I am going from memory here.

The CPU is ok, not brilliant but works. I agree with the sibling comment that the 128GB will be a squeeze. For me RAM and storage (SSD) are most important.

I've also used VirtualBox a lot on this little thing and played in the iOS simulator (mainly to reproduce web bugs).

I'm curious: what distro do you use? There are definitely distributions that don't require much maintenance load.

I'm using Fedora right now, I've tooled around with others. I have a love hate relationship with Gnome 3, frequently contemplate the glory of an overly customized i3 or sway environment but not the amount of time I would put into making it. At the end of the day, I don't mind using Fedora with Gnome on my desktop since that's the self built toy anyway. Ubuntu is out of the question, too many anti-community decisions in that camp IMO (sorry if that's your camp).

I've gotten to a point in life now though where there are some things that I need to "just work". I used android devices for 10 years until I was forced to use an iPhone 6s at work and well now I happily own an iPhone 7 in my personal life. The UX made me go from disliking having a pocket computer to being ambivalent, net win. But having an iPhone and two Linux machines is inconvenient as hell and I'm really looking to get that laptop to just work now too.

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