How are MacBooks for Unity?

I have been using a MacBook for pretty much all my life and I am very comfortable with it. My Old laptop broke and I am now in search of a new one. I would like to use a Mac, but I am not sure if they are that good for game development, as a lot of game dev tools/games are Windows exclusive. If there is a mac that would be good for game dev can you link as a comment?

I am interested in both 2d and 3d but I will probably have more focus on 3d. The 3d wont be too graphically or processor heavy.

If your projects are in line with whatever the hardware capabilities of the MacBook are you are interested in, it should be fine.

On the possible negatives, a MacBook without dedicated graphics wouldn’t be ideal if the projects you have in mind need the performance of a dedicated GPU. Macbooks also get some criticism for their price to performance ratio (often double the price of a comparable performing PC) and poor thermals due to design decisions favoring aesthetics over better functionality.

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It’s fine. I’ve been a professional Unity developer for many years, and I do almost all my work on a MacBook Pro.

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I’ve used Macs for my personal computer for about 10 years now. Owned both a 2011 13" MBP and 2014 15" MBP. Both were top of the line for what you could build at the time. They both handled Unity plenty well (though with lighting intensive scenes, I had to toggle the light widgets off in the scene view.

At my previous job, I used a very expensive 2019 Alienware laptop to do some VR development. It worked great.

I’m currently using a 2019 16" MBP for my day job, which involves doing some ECS-based mapping application development using Unity. No issues with it all.

In conclusion, you can do Unity development using whatever platform you want to use. There are pros and cons to both options, so the best you can do is weigh all the pick the one that sounds most appropriate for you.

PC

  • Pros: VR development is an option, better gaming compatibility. Generally less expensive options.
  • Cons: No iOS/Mac development

Mac

  • Pros: iOS/Mac development is an option. You’re already comfortable with Macs.
  • Cons: No VR, less compatible for gaming. Pricey, as you know.
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I’d clarify that “No VR” point (under Mac cons) to be “no desktop VR”. I use my Mac for doing Quest VR development, and it works fine. (I occasionally do move over to my Windows machine to test the PC VR version, but for a Quest-only title you wouldn’t need to do that.)

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I don’t mean to derail, but isn’t Quest/Android dev a pain when you can’t run it locally? I was doing dev for Go pre-Quest release, and it was preposterously annoying having to build the APK to the device with every little change. Or does Link kind of work on macOS somehow?

I need any and all info you have on this, since not being able to do VR dev has been a depressing thing for me since giving up that Alienware laptop. :stuck_out_tongue:

I dunno, I’ve never done it any other way. It doesn’t seem bad to me. I have all my inputs routed through my own wrapper module, so when running in the editor, I can use a gamepad or keyboard/mouse to interact with the game. And when I need to test on the device, it’s just a matter of plugging it in and hitting Build — it typically takes about 20-30 seconds. No big deal.

If you must have a laptop, macbook pros are decent for dev work. I do a lot of full time dev work on it but prefer to do Unity work on my desktop PC. It just performs much better.

Been using the new 13" macbook pro (i7/16gb RAM) for a few months now with Unity though and it does get hot quickly. (Mobile-optimized 2d/3d game). Something to consider if you plan to use it as your main machine. I only use it to build / test iOS builds / platform specific stuff and it feels a bit slow once it starts to get hot. For a $2000 machine, not “great” value when you could get a 2x-3x faster desktop PC for half the price.

As mentioned by others, being able to develop for iOS/Mac is one of the benefits of the macbook. Main reason I have a macbook is to build unity → iphone app

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