Will a Mac Mini suffice for an iPhone Development machine?

Question

So the past two clients I\'ve been at, all the talk has been about creating an iPhone app, and I won\'t lie, I want to make one. Or at least learn how to make them.

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Answer 1

I have found a late 2014 Mac Mini with 4 Gb Ram and a 1.4 Ghz Intel Core I5 chip to generally be insufficient at getting the job done, developing a iPhone/iPad app.

A Mac Mini does get the job done but when building and starting up a simulator for the first time or switching simulators (say going from iPhone 5 to iPhone 6) it takes minutes to build and run the new instance of a simulator. Once a simulator is up and running, making chances and testing is ok, its still not great though.

Also, the Assets.xcassets manager can almost crash at times and managing asset images is an important task when building your app.

I have also had Xcode just freeze on me for a minute or two but not too often.

General, web browsing in Safari is also a bit lagged when running your app simulation and looking online to fix bugs, again frustrating over time.

I will be moving on from Mac Mini soon and look forward to it, its just not fast enough for good development.

Changing, testing, rebuilding, running, rinse repeat is the failure point of development on a Mac Mini.

Again, its ok, it gets the job done, but it requires patience that I am not used to compared to using a more powerful development machine.

I would recommend making a larger initial financial investment in a Macbook, checkout Craigslist for good deals.