I like to buy an old Macbook pro for learning Unity (I'm on low budget) Wich one do you suggest?

Getting Started
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Hi All,

I’m new here. I’ve been coding for more than 16 years and I used IBM business laptops for coding general business applications in many languages and technologies. I’ve tried a “Macbook Air 13” 2013" of a friend for two months to coding in python and I fell in love with it…
And I started to learn Unity on my “Lenovo T440s” (GPU: Intel HD4400, 12 GB RAM) and even in the beginning it is slow a bit… That’s not a big surprise I know :smile:
So I like to buy the cheapest used Macbook Pro to learn Unity in the first year (I hope in the beginning I will not need strong hardware while I’m just creating little demo projects).
Actually I find two models:

  • MacBook Pro Retina 15,4" 2012, 8Gb, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1GB GDDR5, Intel Core i7 2,3Ghz
  • MacBook Pro 17" 2011, 8Gb, AMD Radeon HD 6700M 1GB, Intel Core i7 2,2Ghz

Do you think that any of these can be enough for the first year in Unity development or I definitely need a newer Macbook Pro. If I need stronger then what model of Macbook Pro’s do you suggest?

(I’m only interested in Macbook Pro’s)

Thanks,
Sammonius

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(imo)
If you mainly learn about programming (not building huge 3d scenes and stuff),
then i think it could work with older unity versions, like unity 4.x, 5.x, or maybe 2017.x. (still useful to learn coding on those, the API hasn’t changed that much in recent versions, for general stuff at least…)

I wouldn’t expect most recent unity versions to run on those machines
and it would get annoying quickly if there’s always delays and waiting…

Can see actual requirements from:

( select older or newer unity versions from the top left drop down )

  • and those might be so old mac’s, that they cannot be upgraded to recent macOS versions anymore.
    ** and if they are so old, you might not be able to deploy your test apps into current ios devices (they require newer xcode and macOS)

So at that point, probably better get more recent mac, if need to deploy to your demos to ios devices…

Note: Computer specs topic is here actually,

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If you’re on a budget you should be considering the new M1 Macbook Air. It’s baseline model is $300 cheaper than the baseline model of the Macbook Pro while being only slightly slower and in my opinion if you’re not prepared to pay for the $2,000 model you shouldn’t even be considering the Pro.

Neither of these come close to the performance of the new M1. Unless you’re buying the last generation of Intel Macbook Pro I wouldn’t even consider the Intel models. I’m not saying that they won’t run Unity but it won’t be a good experience and you won’t be able to use all of the features of the engine.

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Finally I bought a factory renewed Retina Macbook Pro 15 2017/2018 (new condition, perfect) with:

  • Quadcore 2,8 Ghz Intel Core i7
  • 16 Gb LPDDR3 RAM 2133 MHz
  • 256 GB Apple SSD
  • Intel HD Graphics 630 1536 Mb + Radeon Pro 555 2Gb

It cost only $900.
According to my research, it will be enough for teaching and mobile game dev. We will see. But I think I need to buy an external SSD with at least 500GB for this soon.

Thanks for the help!

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I know you’re on a tight budget but don’t buy a right cheap Macbook because it’s within your budget… If you can, spend a tiny bit more to get a better spec with more memory etc.

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Hi, as you can see my last post, I’ve already bought one and I’m fulfilled with it. It was cheap because I did a good buying research…

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Good thing you didn’t go with the 10 year old Macs, they are basically useless if you intend to actually deploy to iOS due to not being allowed to run the latest required XCode.

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