Best Macbook For Programming

Best MacBook for Photographers Our favorite MacBook for photographers remains the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an i9 processor. This great device offers an 8‑core 9th‑generation Intel Core i9 processor and Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz. You'll receive a graphics card boost and 1TB of storage versus the 512GB of storage found on the base model. Like the new MacBook Air, this new MacBook Pro also comes with the M1 chip, but with a few tweaks to make it even more powerful. This means this is an absolute beast when it comes to video editing or 3D rendering. It's also got the best battery life ever in a MacBook, while keeping that gorgeous thin and light design that MacBooks are renowned for.

Developers are doing
great things with Swift.

Swift is a fast and efficient language that provides real-time feedback and can be seamlessly incorporated into existing Objective-C code. So developers are able to write safer, more reliable code, save time, and create even richer app experiences.

Great apps
built using Swift.

More and more developers are incorporating Swift code into their apps. And some are even building all-new apps entirely in Swift.

Better performance
equals better apps.

Swift apps more than live up to the name. For instance, a common search algorithm completes much faster using Swift.

10,000 integers found in a graph
using depth-first search algorithm*

Educators are adding Swift
to their curriculum.

Developers aren’t the only ones who’ve experienced the potential of Swift. Universities and academic institutions around the world teach with Swift and Xcode on Mac, empowering their students with the best tools to build amazing apps. And with Apple’s free Develop in Swift curriculum, the transition from introductory coding to app development with Swift has never been easier.

Colleges and universities that are incorporating Swift into their courses

Aberystwyth University
Borough of Manhattan
Community College
California Polytechnic State University
Central Piedmont Community College
Foothill College
Full Sail University

Houston Community College System
Ingésup
Lawson State Community College
Mesa Community College
Northwest Kansas Technical College
Plymouth University

RMIT University
Southern Methodist University
Stanford University
Technical University of Munich
Tecnológico de Monterrey
University of California, Santa Cruz

Swift is everywhere.
And now it’s open for everyone.

Swift is free and open source, and it’s available to a wide audience of developers, educators, and students under the Apache 2.0 open source license. We’re providing binaries for macOS and Linux that can compile code for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Linux. And to help Swift grow into an even more powerful language, we created a community where users can contribute directly to the Swift source code.

Get started with Swift.

The Definitive Book

Download The Swift Programming Language from the Apple Books Store free. Learn how Swift makes programming easier, more flexible, and more fun.

Download the free book

Xcode

Xcode is the Mac app used to build every other Mac app and every iOS app, too. It has all the tools you need to create an amazing app experience. And it’s available as a free download from the Mac App Store.

Download Xcode from the
Mac App Store

Developer Website

Get detailed technical information and an advanced overview of Swift. Check out the developer blog and stay up to date on the latest news. And enjoy free access to great resources like guides, videos, and sample code.

Learn more

How fast does your MacBook need to be to comfortably code iOS apps with Xcode? Is a MacBook Pro from 2-3 years ago good enough to learn Swift programming? Let’s find out!

Here’s what we’ll get into:

The minimum/recommended system requirements for Xcode 11
Why you need – or don’t need – a fancy $3.000 MacBook Pro
Which second-hand Macs can run Xcode OK, and how you can find out

I’ve answered a lot of “Is my MacBook good enough for iOS development and/or Xcode?”-type questions on Quora. A few of the most popular models include:

The 3rd- and 4th-gen MacBook Pro, with 2.4+ GHz Intel Core i5, i7, i9 CPUs
The 2nd-gen MacBook Air, with the 1.4+ GHz Intel Core i5 CPUs
The 4th-generation iMac, with the 2.7+ GHz Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs

These models aren’t the latest, that’s for sure. Are they good enough to code iOS apps? And what about learning how to code? We’ll find out in this tutorial.

My Almost-Unbreakable 2013 MacBook Air

Since 2009 I’ve coded more than 50 apps for iOS, Android and the mobile web. Most of those apps, including all apps I’ve created between 2013 and 2018, were built on a 13″ MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM and a 1.3 GHz Intel i5 CPU.

My first MacBook was the gorgeous, then-new MacBook White unibody (2009), which I traded in for a faster but heavier MacBook Pro (2011), which I traded in for that nimble workhorse, the mighty MacBook Air (2013). In 2018 I upgraded to a tricked out 13″ MacBook Pro, with much better specs.

Frankly, that MacBook Air from 2013 felt more sturdy and capable than my current MacBook Pro. After 5 years of daily intenstive use, the MacBook Air’s battery is only through 50% of its max. cycle count. It’s still going strong after 7 hours on battery power.

In 2014, my trusty MacBook Air broke down on a beach in Thailand, 3 hours before a client deadline, with the next Apple Store 500 kilometer away. It turned out OK, of course. Guess what? My current MacBook Pro from 2018, its keyboard doesn’t even work OK, I’ve had sound recording glitches, and occasionally the T2 causes a kernel panic. Like many of us, I wish we had 2013-2015 MacBook Air’s and Pro’s with today’s specs. Oh, well…

Learn how to build iOS apps

Get started with iOS 14 and Swift 5

That 100 Mhz i486 PC I Learned to Code With

When I was about 11 years old I taught myself to code in BASIC, on a 100 Mhz i486 PC that was given to me by friends. It had a luxurious 16 MB of RAM, initially only ran MS-DOS, and later ran Windows 3.1 and ’95.

A next upgrade came as a 400 Mhz AMD desktop, given again by friends, on which I ran a local EasyPHP webserver that I used to learn web development with PHP, MySQL and HTML/CSS. I coded a mod for Wolfenstein 3D on that machine, too.

We had no broadband internet at home back then, so I would download and print out coding tutorials at school. At the one library computer that had internet access, and I completed the tutorials at home. The source codes of turn-based web games, JavaScript tidbits and HTML page snippets were carried around on a 3.5″ floppy disk.

Later, when I started coding professionally around age 17, I finally bought my first laptop. My own! I still remember how happy I was. I got my first gig as a freelance coder: creating a PHP script that would aggregate RSS feeds, for which I earned about a hundred bucks. Those were the days!

Xcode, iOS, Swift and The MacBook Pro

The world is different today. Xcode simply doesn’t run on an i486 PC, and you can’t save your app’s source code on a 1.44 MB floppy disk anymore. Your Mac probably doesn’t have a CD drive, and you store your Swift code in a cloud-based Git repository somewhere.

Make no mistake: owning a MacBook is a luxury. Not because learning to code was harder 15 years ago, and not because computers were slower back then. It’s because kids these days learn Python programming on a $25 Raspberry Pi.

I recently had a conversation with a young aspiring coder, who complained he had no access to “decent” coding tutorials and mentoring, despite owning a MacBook Pro and having access to the internet. Among other things, I wrote the following:

Best Macbook For Python Programming

You’re competing with a world of people that are smarter than you, and have better resources. You’re also competing against coders that have had it worse than you. They didn’t win despite adversity, but because of it. Do you give up? NO! You work harder. It’s the only thing you can do: work harder than the next person. When their conviction is wavering, you dig in your heels, you keep going, you persevere, and you’ll win.

Winning in this sense isn’t like winning a race, of course. You’re not competing with anyone else; you’re only really up against yourself. If you want to learn how to code, don’t dawdle over choosing a $3.000 or a $2.900 laptop. If anything, it’ll keep you from developing the grit you need to learn coding.

Great ideas can change the world, but only if they’re accompanied by deliberate action. Likewise, simply complaining about adversity isn’t going to create opportunities for growth – unless you take action. I leapfrogged my way from one hand-me-down computer to the next. I’m not saying you should too, but I do want to underscore how it helped me develop character.

If you want to learn how to code, welcome adversity. Be excellent because of it, or despite it, and never give up. Start coding today! Don’t wait until you’ve got all your ducks in a row.

Which MacBook is Fast Enough for Xcode 11?

The recommended system specs to run Xcode 11 are:

Macbook Air For Developer

A Mac with macOS Catalina (10.15.2) for Xcode 11.5 or macOS Mojave (10.14.4) for Xcode 11.0 (see alternatives for PC here)
At least an Intel i5- or i7-equivalent CPU, so about 2.0 GHz should be enough
At least 8 GB of RAM, but 16 GB lets you run more apps at the same time
At least 256 GB disk storage, although 512 GB is more comfortable
You’ll need about 8 GB of disk space, but Xcode’s intermediate files can take up to 10-30 GB of extra disk space

Looking for a second-hand Mac? The following models should be fast enough for Xcode, but YMMV!

4th-generation MacBook Pro (2016)
3rd-generation Mac Mini (2014)
2nd-generation MacBook Air (2017)
5th-generation iMac (2015)

When you’re looking for a Mac or MacBook to purchase, make sure it runs the latest version of macOS. Xcode versions you can run are tied to macOS versions your hardware runs, and iOS versions you can build for are tied to Xcode versions. See how that works? This is especially true for SwiftUI, which is iOS 13.0 and up only. Make sure you can run the latest!

Pro tip: You can often find the latest macOS version a device model supports on their Wikipedia page (see above links, scroll down to Supported macOS releases). You can then cross-reference that with Xcode’s minimum OS requirements (see here, scroll to min macOS to run), and see which iOS versions you’ll be able to run.

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