I’m in the preparation stage for my journey to iPhone games development and I know absolutely nothing about Macs, I need to buy a Macbook for my Unit3D development, but I don’t want to buy the most expensive ones as it won’t be my main computer for sure.
Can you give me some advice which model would be not most expensive, but the comfort of developing iPhone games on it is good using Unit3D?
I have also heard from a friend mine who says that it is possible to develop an iPhone game with Windows Unity and test it, however only the building part of the project could not be done. Is it true regarding the testing phase could still be runned?
And if you want to save more money, then buy a Mac mini.
You can test the game in the editor, but it isn’t the same as testing with real device. (specially if your gameplay requires multitouch, gyro or something similar)
I thought the same, getting the cheapest Mac machine around, and ended up with a Macbook Air. The very first version. Previously owned.
The good thing first: Even the lowest end Mac machine should be enough if you just want to build your project, put it on a device and so on.
The bad thing: Re-importing the assets takes very very long sometimes, as does building the game. And by “very very long” I mean that. Developing directly on the machine sucks and is impossible.
Though that is of course not a Mac Mini which you can buy new today in terms of performance.
So for a beginner I think it might be OK to just get a hold of basically any machine which is supported. Especially if you are not too deep into game development yet it might be good not to spend the $2000 right in the beginning, just because one never knows if you are going to stick to it (which I hope, just talking out of experience since I met some people who made that exact “mistake”).
But after a while you will surely feel fed up with the performance and possibly look around if you can get a better machine.
One thing that can help you out if you are often reimporting assets is the Unity Asset Cache Server (which sadly requires the unity Team License for $500 )
That just loads the assets from the local database instead of reimporting like hell. I’m using it at a mac mini and it saved me hours.
