Hi,
I was looking for advice on the suitable mac to get for a web app development project for university . Would an Apple MacBook Air 2020 M1 8GB RAM 256GB SSD 13.3" macOS Big Sur, be sufficient ?? Or would I need a newer version !
Sufficient mac for Xcode web app development project
If you use an M1 MacBook Air with 8 GB of memory, you may not be able to open multiple Xcode projects. I had one 2 and a half years ago at work. It often hung up. Also, depending on how much you write code, Xcode projects can quickly fill up your SSD. My M2 Mac mini has 512 GB space with an external HD taken from an old iMac machine. Each week, I create a few dozen Xcode projects in SwiftUI and lose several GB to them. So I end up deleting old data folders in DrivedData. As you probably, you cannot increase memory or swap SDDs with machines with Apple-made chips.
Depends on how large the web app is. If this is the only development you plan, you could get a try, even though you will face hurdles from time to time.
More generally, I have found by experience:
- 16 GB are really necessary if you have mid or large size projects
- 1 TB of storage is really a minimum
- Processing power is not the issue
- screen size is important to work efficiently with Xcode. 13" is probably too small, except to start learning, but you can later attach an external monitor.
And finally, MacBookAir 2020 will not support new OS versions (and hence new Xcode) for a long time.