MacBooks and Xcode development worth their weight in gold or rose gold?

[smacrumon]

So considering a new MacBook. Anyone have experience with MacBooks and Xcode development?

Are the new MacBooks released earlier this year powerful enough for Xcode development? The display at 12 inches, is that going to be too small to be useful?

Appreciate any guidance and views on this.

 

[c0ppo]

As far as display goes, no one can answer that for you. Only you can know that, since it's quite subjective.

But as far as xcode goes, I have 2015 rMB 1,2GHz. I hook it up to my 24 Dell monitor and use that setup as dual display. Everything works like a charm, no hickups or anything annoying. I use rMB for Unity3D and Corona SDK as well. Heavy multitasker.

But this machine still handles it all quite well.

 

[Supertaff]

I've just bought a 2015 1.1 ghz Macbook from the Apple Refurb store, while not my main purpose I am doing some simple development on it as well in Xcode 7. So far I've not had any issues with it, but would I guess depend how big your source code is as I would suspect the the compile time for large projects would be longer than on more powerful machines.

In terms of the screen, I find it excellent as long as you don't have poor eyesight as the text at default resolution can feel small. I also connect the MacBook to my 55inch 4K tv, via Apple Airplay with Apple TV so that I can sit comfortably on the couch with my main IDE in front of me and other windows that I don't want to use so often up on the airplay display, e.g. simulator windows.

 

[cambookpro]

I don't own one personally but used one for a day for a project. It worked fine, though the display was too small for my liking (I usually use my 15" with a TBD). Compiling was a little slower and it beach-balled very occasionally, but in all honesty I'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between using it and my MBP (early 2011, quad-core 2.2 GHz) when writing code and using Interface Builder (or whatever it's called now).