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Macbook Air is fine for iOS development The iOS simulator is neither a simulator or emulator in traditional sense. Rather it is software layer with graphics ou
by joakleaf 2y ago
Macbook Air is fine for iOS development
The iOS simulator is neither a simulator or emulator in traditional sense.
Rather it is software layer with graphics output where (simple) iOS apps can run. Everything runs as native code. Even if you test your executables on Intel, the iOS app is compiled to native x64 code.
The iOS devices A-chips are all the same family as the M-chips, and some of the iPads even use M-chips. So performance should be equivalent or even a bit faster on the Air than what you experience on the final devices.
Only thing that is slow is (now deprecated) OpenGLES code -- Presumably because this goes through a software graphics layer.
- ferguess_k 2y agoThanks, that's very nice to know. I never realized that the emulator is like that, thanks for enlightening me. That said, I'll probably look into an Apple refurbished M1/M2 Macbook Air with as much memory as possible. 16GB feels like the lower end. My work laptop is a pro with 18GB of RAM and I got OOM notifications frequently (some Databricks webpages really eat a lot of RAMs, like a few GBs).