I know nothing final has been announced around Unity 5 requirements but I’m just wondering if anyone knows whether 4 GB of RAM will be reasonably safe to build / compile mobile games with Unity 5. I do my main development on a PC with 8GB of RAM but to build to iOS, I just bought a MacBook air with 4GB of RAM. I use it just for compile to Xcode so no real development. It runs my current games (high end mobile games) without any problem. Do you guys think it’s safe to keep this computer for a similar role with Unity 5? I still have a chance to return this computer and get something else if you guys don’t think it’ll be sufficient but I’d like to keep it, if possible, because I’ve already set it up and it’s still a reasonable cheap Mac.
If you only use it for minor tasks you’ll probably be able to get away with it, but having more memory is not a bad thing. From what I’ve seen on various sites the memory in your MacBook Air is soldered directly to the logic board (motherboard) and upgrading later requires replacing the board.
There are other problems when it comes to working on mac when doing anything - like HEAT. Unity has cost me 2 MBPR machines that had 16GB of RAM and an nvidia 650m.
The first time I opened a large project in unity, my charger turned yellow and melted.
The next stress test given to the replacement macbook pro with the [useless] retina display burned out the fan in 3 months.
All in all, it’s fun to cost apple a lot of money because their recent hardware designs fail with heavy use, but if you want to work on a medium sized project, get a desktop or a big name windows laptop like gigabyte or alienware. On a side note, during those 3 months of testing, the mac case got SO hot (in a ventilated room running nothing but twitch.tv via chrome) that when I touched the charger, my skin literally boiled and I have a little scar on my arm to remember Apple by.
Thanks for the feedback guys. So to clarify, I’ll be using the Mac only for building to iOS. Not actual development other than tweaking things like GUI elements to make sure they still fit on the iOS screen. I won’t be re-doing baking or anything … unless Unity 5 requires that. For Unity 4, I use baked lights and light probes and I didn’t have to redo those for the iOS build. I presume that the new enlighten engine would work the same way … do the bulk of the work on the heavy duty PC and not have to redo any of it for the iOS build on the mac?
The entirety of development and the vast bulk of testing will be done on my PC. The mac would only used for switching platforms to iOS and then clicking the build button basically.
Well, I have a much larger screen on my PC so even if the macbook Air is capable of doing full development, my preference would still be to use my PC for the windows, windows phone and android builds.
Thanks for sharing … what are the warranty’s like on Macs? I presume, from your description, that Apple replaced the computers in these cases. I didn’t look too closely but how long does that protection / warranty last for?
4gb seem a bit short to me, os, unity , xcode open may already eat up quite bit.
I never had issue like Tomnn said with my mac book pro retina 2013 and I am working mostly with it, bringing it everywhere I go…but depending of your use, it maybe worth subscribe for an apple care things when you buy it, it was something like 30000 yen and this provide 3 years garanty in case of hardware failure…( on retina version replacing the screen itself is about 200 000 yen ).
They replaced it with a new computer each time since retina models can’t be repaired (all components soldered to all other components), going in soon for the final replacement after my new windows machine arrives tuesday. They admit they’re a bit clueless and just hand me a brand new laptop. I’ll be giving this one to my mom since she likes macs and uses her computers so infrequently I don’t think this will be an issue.
I think my warranty lasts until this winter. Older laptops from apple are fine, don’t know what’s up with their new stuff. With this and the recent iPhone bending issue because they forget to put a metal plate there (which is present in all previous models of the phone)… I think Apple is losing it a bit. They’re not quite at blackberry status, but if anyone owns any apple stock you should look into this
It’s fine if you have the money to replace it in 2 - 4 years with an 8GB model. It’s really only the RAM that is the problem and that only if you do 3D modeling and would run Unity, 3D Modeling Program, and Photoshop or Gimp concurrently.
Now if you have great success a more capable PC or Mac isn’t going to change what you need to produce a mobile game. Where the 8GB comes into play is producing these ‘Retina’ / ‘4KHD’ images which truthfully your current Mac should do be able to do because after all those images will be used on definitely less capable but newest top-of-the-line iPads.
Now if you want to produce a BR’s worth of content for console game then you’ll need more in the way of your computer but you’ll need to be quite a bit more than a one person shop then too.
I personally think 4GB is barely tolerable and 8GB should be the bare minimum.
Not to mention you want to use all those new features Unity 5 now comes with like the new Enlighten Real-Time Global Illumination integration that would probably use up heaps of RAM.
4GB should be fine for building your release iOS version. I just built a small game to iOS IPA in Unity 4.6 and the memory sat at 1.4GB in Activity monitor.
Note: As op said, this is just for building an iOS version on, not his main dev machine.
I’d keep it, though you could have a more powerful Mac Mini for the money (but a pain in extra keyboards+mice).
