I have a Mac mini right now from early 2009. Nvidia GeForce 9400 256 mb video card. Doesn’t do a good job of testing games, had a lot of problems with the last game to be honest. I want to work with more polygons and larger textures but Im going to need to upgrade my tech.
I wonder if anyone has any input on the MacBooks… I’m looking for the lowest end device that can handle a decent iOS and Mac development project. I was hoping for an air because their less expensive, I don’t know how well they would perform though. This is for full 3d rendered games not 2d.
I also noticed there are quad and dual cores now… Do I need a quad or is a dual sufficient?
A quad core is better, if you need it. Unity will take advantage of it in certain situations (calculating the light map comes to mind). If you’re after a used model, I would recommend getting at least the early 2011 mbp model, and going with 16gb of RAM. Unity 4 is quite a memory hog especially when creating directional lightmaps (known problem). Looks like they’re going for $1400 or so on Ebay right now.
If you want a new model, and you’re looking at prices, you can get the 13" Air for about the same price. It has intel HD4000 graphics, which is about 2.5 times as fast as your 9400m, but still only half as fast as the mbp I mention above.
If you want a new model, and want to get the “best for your buck”, and still be fast enough, then get the 15" mbp:
I have a Mac Book Air (not the current version) last version. It works great. Unity runs really well.
You’re going to want to hook it up to an external monitor because the 13" screen is a bit rough for a program like Unity with lots of tool bars, and folder trees, and windows, etc.
I think a new Macbook Air is coming out this summer? Maybe wait till then then get THIS generation Macbook Air cheap and get a big monitor off of craigslist or something.
Thanks, good to have a basic idea of how much more powerful they will be. I’m not a big fan of used tech so il probably go with a new model. Haven’t decided yet between pro and air but this helps.
My 2 cents, personally I’d try to get a Macbook Pro not an Air.
I had a 2009 Air and the HDD died within 16 months and was going to cost £200+ to repair. Whilst I loved my Air at first, compared to a laptop it was so light, sleek and cool, I found it sorely lacking in connections, with one USB, mini-Displayport and headphone socket. It also got insanely hot when pushing 3d graphics.
In addition I ended up buying quite a few Apple connectors, the aforementioned ethernet adapter, mini-displayport to vga adapter and few other things. Stuff that I felt I shouldn’t have needed to buy, certainly shouldn’t have required propriety products and started my dislike of Apple’s overall approach to fleecing its users at every step. Which also includes the fact that the Air wasn’t upgradable at all and even replacing parts is damn awkward.
Of course that goes for most of Apples products these days and though it was a major factor in deciding to get a Mac BookPro recently I’m not entirely sure its any more extensible/repairable, though it does at least have an Ethernet connection
Granted I believe they have improved the Air’s now, don’t they come with two USB ports? However my experience really put me off them, at least for a serious work machine. In fact if it wasn’t for wanting to have something portable instead of yet another desktop I would probably have got a Mac Mini instead, though the new ones don’t support dedicated GPU’s which is a shame.
I’d also be careful about buying second hand or older Macs in general, purely because when I looked into using my 2009 Air for iOS it looked very likely that it wasn’t going to be supported by the latest OS X. I don’t think that happened this time, but I’ve little doubt it will next year if it hasn’t. The planned obsolescence from Apple should also be a factor you take into account. Again a real shame as generally Mac hardware will last a long time, I still have a G3 and G4 that work perfectly.
