Hi,
I am long time window user with no experience in Mac , i saw many videos on youtube but got more confused with different opinions...
I am thinking of buying 21.5 inch 2017 iMac(3.4 Ghz, i5 7th gen, 8 GB Ram) with 1 TB fusion drive(24 GB of SSD) , however many people say go for full SSD, i am a bit cinfused , how come 1 TB fusion drive be slow and insufficient ...
Kindly guide will 1 TB fusion drive iMac be enough for Swift development ....
Thanks
Amit
Yes it will be enough. I use the lowest model of MacBook Air which is theoretically capable of much less (but travels better). Even it is perfectly sufficient for all the Swift related development tasks I do on a day to day basis. It is certainly faster than my Windows/Linux machine...
From what I’ve seen, developers tend to be most affected by the screen size of their device. When the screen is small, the greatest slowdown occurs because of the need to repeatedly hunt for windows to switch between code, documentation, file system and terminal because there isn’t room for all of them on the screen at once. From that standpoint iMac’s large screen will be very handy too.
Swift will work on pretty much anything; compile times are mainly CPU limited, and mostly single-threaded for release/whole-module optimisation builds. The i5 in that iMac will do fine in that regard.
In terms of computer purchasing, though, I’d say 16GB of RAM at least is a must if you’re planning on doing any sort of development, and SSDs improve the experience of using the computer so much that I’d definitely recommend going for a small-ish SSD over a large Fusion Drive - you can always plug in external storage later if you need it.
@SDGGiesbrecht - thanks that is nice to know that the 1TB imac will be enough
@Torust - thanks, sadly my budget restricts me right now as i need to buy an iphone as well to test the apps that i will make , hence i am trying to make it work with the budget, however do you think that with out 16GB and ssds the emulators might not work ?
If not that is a bit worrying for me ....as i cannot afford the upgraded one with 16GB and SSDs right now ...
Amit
Everything will work (and the iOS Simulator is not an emulator, so it’s not that demanding). I’d personally drop to the 3.0GHz CPU (and the lesser GPU that model comes with should be fine if you’re mainly doing iOS development) to get 16GB of RAM and the SSD. It’s worth noting that Thunderbolt eGPUs are an option later if you need more GPU power.
This entire topic is slightly off topic for the Swift forums, though. You might be better off asking somewhere like the Buyer’s Advice section of the MacRumors forums; they should be able to give you much more in-depth help.