iOS dev with no Mac - When did you crack and buy one?

News & General Discussion
1

So developing for iOS with no Mac…

I had a hackintosh and got tired of it. The constant needing to look on the internet for what hardware works and what doesnt. The occasional upgrade that just breaks your “Mac” and having to rebuild your OS. It got old. I currently have 10.10 running in VMplayer on a 3770k overclocked to 4.7ghz with 16GB of ram and Windows 7.

While this setup works with my very small game that I’m about to deploy in the app store, I cant help stop thinking what its going to be like with bigger games. My current Unity game is only about 60MB. Cooking it for iOS turns it into this 360MB monster and xcode needs to sort that, and build that, and process that and upload that. It eventually turns back into a 60MB feather weight on my iPhone. But all this importing and building makes xcode eat up a lot of time, and I’m sure I’m not the only one that continuously builds and builds to keep testing on a device. All this time really adds up.

At what point did you guys raise the white flag and decided to buy a mac for Xcode? As fun as having 10.10 in VMplayer is, I cant stop to wonder that it will never be as fast as running natively on a Mac.

2

About two years ago when I also got tired of the work that comes with a hackintosh. I bought a very old (even for then) sub $200 mbp and haven’t looked back since (obviously not my main dev machine which is windows). Staying on the latest OSX version is now easy and deployment to the app store works well.

If it’s not you main dev machine and is primarily for IOS there is no need for native speed though.

3

Also remember that Unity Cloud Build is coming.

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4

Unity cloud looks pretty interesting! But then I find myself building a few times an hour trying to duplicate a bug and how how thats going to add up with cloud costs lol.

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I’ve only had mine for a bit over a month so I haven’t had those problems. Thing is your hackintosh is worth like 3k if you’d buy it from apple so for me its still worth it. I have a setup somewhat similar to yours.