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Affordable MacBook for building a Flutter application (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by sajran@lemmy.ml to c/apple@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] Pechente@feddit.de 1 points 2 years ago

I‘d suggest a used M1 MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM. They should be relatively cheap now and they’re still great machines.

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Does it have to be a MacBook? If you just want to use it to build and test the simulator, you can get a used old (x86) Mac mini for ~150€ on eBay. Though maybe it’s a better idea for longevity to go with Apple Silicon, I have no idea how long x86 will keep getting updates.

[–] sajran@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I would prefer a laptop but every response is helpful. Thank you!