So it’s time to get serious with my app, and produce the iPhone version. Sadly my old mac is ‘too old’ now… So gota buy a new one.
I’m selling my super windows computer to do this. Is this mac above worth $1k and will it still be able to run the correct version of XCode for like 2 years?
Any help appreciated 
I’ve been using my Early 2015 macbook pro for a couple years now with xcode and meteor and it works just fine. I bought it at usedmac.com for about $750 USD.
Awesome. Good stuff.
If you build your mobile app in React Native you could use Expo which has build servers for iOS and could save you the cost of the purchase of the Mac Book.
Yeah really? No need for Xcode?
I am quite invested in Blaze.
I’m about to pickup a Mac book air, new…
30 day returns tho so I guess I’ll test it out
I would go straight and buy the mackbook pro, I had a 2014 13 inch but with 4gb ram and it worked with no issues. But I will recommend you getting the extra ram.
With react native and expo it depends on the project, the features and packages you want, but is also a posibility.
If you are going to use the macbook air only to build and test it might not be a bad option if you actually like that computer.
So, I am 31. I am turning in to a QUALITY freak. I did go and buy Micrsofts best and was super disappointed.
Went to staples, got my MacBook Air 2018 new model for $1700 CAD taxes in. Open the box, bam, it’s amazing.
I just got home, Meteor is installed with no fuss. Now I’m sitting here blogging. Neato.
I go to connect to WiFi and my iPhone asks if I want to share the connection password. Yes.
My god, apple is so much better than Microsoft and I’ve been SO WRONG about it.
I’m concerned about the 128gig hdd… lol. Windows would eat up about 80gigs after a month or two.
But this Mac is my main workhorse. I will NOT be gaming on it. Sold my Alienware R17 with all my game accounts.
TIME TO GET TO WORK.
PS: Come check out YouDoer again in a few more days, the social components are almost done, it’s getting very slick indeed!
Thanks for your input, cheers… A Mac user…
I will just say that, holy crap, this little 128gb ssd and 8gb of ram running a i5 is WAY out performing my big super fat Surfacebook Pro which was twice the price.
All hail Mac.
I feel actually stupid for not have switching to Apple 10 years ago… I’ve wasted my life :’(
I’d still be using my late 2013 Mac Book Pro if the GPU didn’t fail… 2015 should be fine
I was primarily worried, I have a 2008 MacBook that is super slow (in general) – and Xcode will no longer let me publish from that MacBook.
But, Ive been on the new 2018 all day long and its aaaaweeeesome.
Just for the sake of the argument, Surface is not one of the best laptop PCs by any stretch. If you truly wanted the best, you’d get one of these. I’d say Mac vs PC is more a matter of taste rather than performance, these days.
You guys realize that “Surface” is comprised of several lines?
Surface Pro, Laptop, Book and Studio?
I’m on a Yoga 15" 730, which is their mid-range tier - it was less than half the cost of a similar MacBook Pro (similar RAM/SSD/GPU), and has a fast large SSD, and a dGPU (GTX 1050), and the hardware feels solid (almost a MacBook quality, but not quite).
The only problem I’ve had with it, is that it runs Windows! The command line is terrible compared with any *NIX terminal, and WSL is only partly workable (other bash on Windows suffer from still being Windows underneath) - chocolatey is not what you’d hope for (it’s not homebrew or aptitude). Various other things just don’t run well on Windows (Adobe’s stuff, multiple monitor support - though that’s much improved from a few years ago, I haven’t tried high color gamut yet, but it was always really hard to get that right on Windows, and other little annoyances). There isn’t any real way to run a sudo-less like Windows setup - too many things require admin privs - and the means you need IO blocking (SLOW) software like Windows Defender to avoid viruses. There just isn’t a good email client on Windows that I can find (not a problem if you use gmail of course). On the other hand, there are some things Windows does better - it’s scale model for non-powers of two sized screen DPIs is better, it has a touch screen, which is great for mobile dev - I actually can’t think of anything else. Gaming is better of course, but I’m mostly talking about workstation aspects in this case.
The real biggest problem is that Meteor has some catastrophic work flow breaking performance problems on Windows. I run it in a VM to work around that problem - it’s seriously that slow (less than 10 second rebuilds inside VM - 100+ seconds rebuilds in Windows!). At some point I’ll probably switch to Ubuntu and run that from boot. Windows hasn’t been terrible enough that I have to stop everything to do that though, so that’s worth noting. It’s only Meteor that runs so slowly.
As far as hardware more broadly - Windows vendors have largely caught up to Apple in terms of quality, IMHO. If you want to spend Apple sorts of money, you’ll get hardware as good or better than MacBook Pro with more options (Razer Blades are gorgeous, or higher end work station Lenovo units, or Surface Book with dGPU) - and if you want to spend less (in my case, LESS THAN HALF) you can get hardware almost as good, with nothing comparable in the Apple line up. For (less than) half the cost, almost as good is good enough for me - and I get to have my function keys and full USB and HDMI ports!
I just wish Meteor ran better on Windows…
(It should go without saying, but if you still need to publish iOS or macOS apps - you are locked in to Apple hardware. In my case, I spent so much less on my replacement PC, I’ll probably pick up a cheap Mac Mini or MacBook Air for any kind of iTunes connect work I need to do, and will still have spent less overall than buying a replacement MacBook Pro.)
Well, Apple’s also not sooo great on the multiple monitor front.
I cannot use my 21:9 screen with my MacMini in combination with Suspend. I have to do a full shutdown/reboot or I’ll invariably resume from suspend into a black screen. 16:9 works fine.
Apple has acknowledged that this is a bug.
But I’d also say that we can lock this thread as it has turned into OS bashing.
I think the discussion over development platform (OS included) is important, and should be open to discussion. Folks should know for example that Meteor development on Windows has a very important performance issue where build times are multiple times slower than alternative *NIX platforms, and have additional problems like the dev server not responding until after the legacy build has silently completed building (I’ve suggested elsewhere that it’s so problematic, the Windows port should either be pulled or fixed, that Windows+Meteor is not a realistic option at things stand). It should also not be a hidden truth, that Node.js in general has performance issues on Windows (mostly because of well documented slowness with file renames in the Windows filesystem, and issues with Windows Defender blocking IO - there’s a whole Meteor WIKI page on this). Most of the posts on these threads about even installing Meteor on Windows talk about (usually repeated) failures with Chocolatey, and those are hard to work through. I don’t think these are issues anyone should hide away from view. Additionally, Apple hardware has gotten much more expensive over time (from already pretty expensive), and there are a lot of folks looking to move to Windows - the pros/cons of that switch are particularly relevant to Meteor developers, and anyone who may still need to build iOS apps.
At the very least we should have some clear answers as to how to handle the Meteor specific issues - like installation, and running Meteor’s dev server in a VM (and not Bash for Windows or WSL, which don’t work reliably enough, and don’t solve the file system performance problem anyway).
While that may be true I do not think that the general tone of this thread is very helpful.
Considering that I’m also doing C# development I’m not exactly someone who has a big problem with build times taking a second or even 10.
A minute and a half though? Even 30 or 40 seconds - yeah, it’d be slower than *NIX, but a full minute and a half to 2 minutes is way too long - and it gets worse if you save in the middle of a rebuild since rebuilds stack. It’s a serious bar to adoption on Windows.
Over the summer, I had some interns working on a Meteor project - all of those on Windows failed to even get the app up an running, while the interns I had on Linux and macOS successfully turned in work. I hadn’t yet switched to Windows, so I didn’t even understand the problem. That’s not a good look.
I accept your point about the tone in general. I’ll leave on the fact that I still love Meteor, and have been willing to jump through hoops to continue using it - even running it in a VM! 
I think this is a good workaround. Personally, I don’t do any Node development work in Windows, and don’t remember ever attempting to. I rely on Linux. But a problem I’ve always had is that some IDEs just don’t look right, or are buggy in something like Ubuntu. Even a simple editor like Sublime, which I use for some light Python work, has a few annoying glitches. In Windows I have no problems with any of these: WebStorm, Eclipse, or Sublime. And their UI looks & works great.
I’ve been a happy bunny until some of the BIOS updates for Meltdown and Spectre have seriously slowed down my old-ish Thinkpad, and with it, the VMs used for development. Our Meteor app has over 8K files.
I ordered a Thinkpad X1 Extreme, with the best config I could get. Hopefully that will get me back to cruising speed.
I run git and meteor on the VM - but I run VS Code on Windows, and access the files stored on the VM over a bridged network share. Best of both worlds! (The only downside is that my linter inside VS Code is a bit slow.)