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Comment by ferguess_k | Hacker News Reader

11 inch is a bit too small. 13-inch is the sweet spot. I wish Macbook Air is powerful enough for MacOS/iOS research and development but everyone tells me that I need a pro for the emulator. Kinda makes sense though.

I use a pro at work and it is pretty heavy, sometimes I could barely pick it up with one hand if I had to extend my arm. Maybe more upper body exercises?

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Macbook Air is fine for iOS development

The iOS simulator is neither a simulator or emulator in traditional sense. Rather it is software layer with graphics output where (simple) iOS apps can run. Everything runs as native code. Even if you test your executables on Intel, the iOS app is compiled to native x64 code.

The iOS devices A-chips are all the same family as the M-chips, and some of the iPads even use M-chips. So performance should be equivalent or even a bit faster on the Air than what you experience on the final devices.

Only thing that is slow is (now deprecated) OpenGLES code -- Presumably because this goes through a software graphics layer.

Thanks, that's very nice to know. I never realized that the emulator is like that, thanks for enlightening me.

That said, I'll probably look into an Apple refurbished M1/M2 Macbook Air with as much memory as possible. 16GB feels like the lower end. My work laptop is a pro with 18GB of RAM and I got OOM notifications frequently (some Databricks webpages really eat a lot of RAMs, like a few GBs).

Everyone is lying to you. Assuming you're talking about the iOS Simulator, the MacBook Air will do you just fine.

Thanks, I'll do more research. This is becoming temping as Air is affordable so will attract less negative energy from *wife.

I use an M3 air for my personal machine which is used for c++ development and music production — it’s an excellent machine and I have yet to encounter a task that would require a MPB (at least for the type of work I am involved with).

Thanks. How much memory does it have? I figured 16 GB might be a bit in the low end for XCode, the emulator, some other random software and a lot of Firefox tabs.

Will you be running a lot of containers for dev environment or background services?

I don't think so. I'll probably write some MacOS system software, like probing their battery APIs and such, but they are going to be small.

I'm not exactly sure how I'd proceed to learn the MacOS/iOS internals, I'll have to look into it, but I don't think I need to run a VM, unless I hack the XNU kernel? QEMU does run on MacOS so I guess that's additional 4GB - 6GB of memory for the kernel?

I dunno about lying; it used to be true in the Intel age so it might simply be a matter of their information being out of date.

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