XCode 4 and Lion - Need Advice

[guppy1000]

I plan on getting an Air strictly to make some simple iPhone/iPad Apps with XCode 4 and do light web browsing and email, watch movies. Will probably also want to upgrade to Lion.


I'm looking at an 11" Air with 64 GB and 2 MB RAM.

Am I really 'cutting it close' if I want to use XCode 4 with these lowish specs? (Assume no other major apps running in the background).


Also, in your opinion, should I bother waiting a month or so for the Core I5 refresh?

Anyone know if the Refresh will have an Ethernet port built in?

 

[mfram]

I am using my 13" MBA for Xcode just fine. From a performance standpoint, the current 11" MBA will be fine. 64GB might be a little tight on storage though. If you plan on doing anything else with the machine (large iTunes library, etc.) then you will probably want more storage. 2GB of RAM should be fine unless you have a very large project. Personally, I have the 4GB model. You can't upgrade the RAM later, so if you think you might want 4GB, you need to buy it upfront.

I seriously doubt the new MBA will have built-in ethernet. Apple hasn't put ethernet on one so far so I seriously doubt they will start now.

 

[mfram]

I thought a little about why the MBA doesn't have ethernet. I think it comes down to this: an RJ-45 jack used for ethernet is larger than the MBA. So if you did have ethernet you'd need some kind of (proprietary) dongle arrangement.

The physical space of the MBA prevents more than about 4 ports even if they are small. One is power, one is video. That leaves 2 at most. Would you rather have 1 USB and 1 dedicated ethernet (with a dongle) or 2 USB where one USB can be used as ethernet with a dongle? I'd rather have 2 USB. And eventually the video will double as a Thunderbolt port.

Given that 802.11n pretty much approaches ethernet speeds, that pretty much seals the argument for no ethernet.

If you really want ethernet, get the Apple USB/Ethernet dongle.

 

[seepel]

In my experience XCode 4 is a bit more resource hungry than XCode 3 was, I wouldn't want to do it with less than 4GB of memory.