this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Apple

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Hi guys,

I'm currently building a mobile application using Flutter. Until now my target platform was Android but I'd like to build and publish it for iOS as well. For this I need access to macOS environment, both to build the application and to test it in iOS Simulator. Please note that I don't intend to actually develop on this machine.

I'm considering a few options like running macOS VM on my machine (no luck so far) or using some kind of cloud VM. The most obvious option is to just buy a Mac of course. However, I really don't want to spend a lot on this and Apple computers aren't exactly known for being affordable. Here's my question: which MacBook would you recommend to buy used just for the purposes I listed above?

I tried googling this of course but it's really hard for me to find any useful advice. Please note that I have no knowledge about Apple devices and ecosystem whatsoever, I never used any of them.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you're just testing on it you can get away wit pretty much anything as long as it's Apple Silicon. I would think a used M1 Mini is probably your cheapest bet, and as a bonus you can use it as a media serve for Plex of something when you're not testing on it.

If it's got to be a laptop form factor, then yes, an MBA is probably your best bet.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

A laptop would be probably easier to manage for me and I see that both have a similar price so I would probably go with MBA. Thanks for the answer!