Which Apple Pc should i choose?

News & General Discussion
1

Hello Unity People.

I make my games on my Windows PC, and it is apps im making. But i really want to make apps for iOS.
And apperently im need a Apple PC.

So which on do you recommend, if i only gonna use it for build the game to iOS and upload it?

Should i take and iMac, for its stationary?
Should i take a Macbook Air, so i have a light laptop with long battery which i can use for long travel distance?

Or should i chose something else? Please give me your suggestions

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2

What are the specs of both? :sunglasses:

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Do you move around a lot or not? If you code on the run, then you want a laptop. If you are going to do all of your work behind a desk, then get a desktop.

On a slightly off topic note, anyone know if cloud build will let you bypass the need to use XCode locally? Only relevant if you are a pro user. But there is not a huge price difference between becoming a pro user and buying a new Mac.

4

I do this all the time.

You can submit to UCB from a PC and it will build an iOS app for you to test on iPad/iPhone. The app is installed to your device directly via the UCB website so you don’t have to use XCode to compile anything or your Mac to deploy it.

However, you need to setup some developer certificates and mobile provision files (and load them into UCB when you setup each project) and you need a Mac to create those files. You can use the same cert and provision files for all your UCB projects.

You have to recreate the cert and provision files once a year around the time your Apple developer account is up for renewal.

I think some people in the UCB forum have tried to do this with a hackintosh or a Mac OS VM. I’m not sure how successful that was. You’ll have to do some digging in the UCB forum.

If you intend to do your development on PC, I would buy the cheapest Mac Mini (or even used Mac Mini that supports the latest OSX) and use it just for setting up your certs and provision files and your final XCode compiles.

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5

Thanks @schmosef . For once a year I could even borrow something. That’s changed my plan from buying a mac to buying pro. That’s a more useful approach for me.

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A couple more things:

  1. UCB is usually a little behind in updating to the latest Unity release or patch release. This can be frustrating if your game relies on a very recent bug fix.

  2. I haven’t published to the app store yet so I’m a little hazy on the details but I think that for the build you submit to Apple, you need to use XCode yourself because of some project settings you have to make. So you should plan on having direct access to a Mac in the later stages of your project.

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