XCode 7.1 Slow to Install on MacBook

This is moronic. If the installs take this long year after year after year then what is the issue? Come clean Apple engineers. I have the latest and greatest from Apple. Brand new machine Dec 2020. New Apple chip. lots of space and RAM. Please break up your installs if you cannot figure this out. This was just supposed to be an update today. I just installed the complete Xcode two weeks ago.

Xcode is not in a normal .zip file. It is in a .xip file. They are nearly identical except for one minor detail: .xip files are signed for integrity. The advantage is you are guaranteed to be downloading Apple's Xcode and not a fraud trying to get access to your computer. This is likely the cause of part of your problems, along with Xcode's whopping 17+ GB for an app. The xip has to first verify the xip integrity which will take a minute since the xip is pretty large. Then it has to unzip. The xip is probably packed tight so it will take a while.

You can read more about the .xip file type on Wikipedia. It's interesting.

It is deteriorating day by day. XCode performance is getting slower and slower in each release. My installation took more than 3 hrs. Apple devs, why are you not focusing on the performance of the product? 5-6 years ago, it was far better, but with time using XCode has become a pain for me.

Xcode is an absolute dog to install, it's heavy and slow regardless, but i had this exact same issue on a VirtualBox, i left it for about 4 hours and it made near zero progress.

I juiced up the VM ram from 4gb to 16gb, and it installed in about an hour for me. It seems clear RAM is the key, and with 16gb+ on a proper mac i imagine you'd get this under 30mins.

Always sucks when hardware is the issue.

[only some discussion] Hi, I just came across this when I was trying to install homebrew and it installed XCode for me. I am using the M1 MacBook Air. It cost me around one hour. So maybe a new and empty computer will do better in installing XCode?

The fact this problem of showing "3 minutes" when it clearly takes over an hour to install the tools (and still isn't fixed in XCode 13) is ridiculous. MacOS is starting to remind me of Windows ME with all of the bugs and garbage that get released 1/2 baked.

I'll just point out that these days, installing always takes about 2 hours or more on my 2018 MacBook Pro. Xcode is just a pig.

That being said, if you have Microsoft Defender running, all bets are off. I always have to uninstall Defender before doing an Xcode upgrade.

Well, another newbie here. This is my first time actually using a MacBook and I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with 16Gigs of RAM and still, the installation of XCode takes drastically long even with the latest MacBook. I previously installed XCode on a VM but I left that one open overnight while sleeping and I didn't know that it takes this long. I was just about the abort the installation and restart it again but thankfully I found this topic. Well, the downloading part is ok. But the whole installation process is extremely slow. So, if you're having the same problems, probably you should wait for some more time. Just don't think that there is something wrong with your PC.

With M1 Pro chip and 16GB of RAM, it took about 30 minutes to finish the installation

I tried to download directly from website https://developer.apple.com/download/all/?q=xcode save me a lot of time

I have M1 Pro with 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD 300GB is free it took one hour and ongoing it’s not even hot or throttling. Damn!

I also only have 8GB, but my solution was that I had an app (like CleanMyMac) installed and was able to clear my Memory while the installation was running. That seemed to have helped speed things up.