Search Unity

  1. Megacity Metro Demo now available. Download now.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Unity support for visionOS is now available. Learn more in our blog post.
    Dismiss Notice

Question Buying a Mac for building Unity to iOS? What should I look for? (Never owned a Mac before...)

Discussion in 'Editor & General Support' started by mikejm_, Dec 6, 2022.

  1. mikejm_

    mikejm_

    Joined:
    Oct 9, 2021
    Posts:
    346
    I have seen there are a few ways to build an iOS version of an app from Unity via Cloud or some addons in Windows. However, I think the easiest thing to be sure is just to bite the bullet and buy an old cheap refurbished MacBook to run the builds on for testing.

    I am unfamiliar with Macs though as I have never owned one.

    For reference, I am just building mobile apps that are typically 150-250 MB APK's when built to Android (not a massive project), so I probably don't need anything fancy.

    1) I see cheap refurbished units like "Apple MacBook Air Core i5 1.6GHz 4GB RAM 128GB SSD 11" MJVM2LL/A (2015)" for ~$150 USD on Ebay. Would something like that likely be adequate?

    2) How does MacOS work for automatic upgrades? Would an old version laptop like that still run the most up to date OS? Or would that be a potential problem? Eg. I see GitHub Desktop (what I'd use to sync the program build code) needs "macOS 10.12 or later" and I presume Unity and other packages would need a certain version too.

    3) Would using GitHub Desktop be a reasonable way to sync across to the Mac from my main project (just pull it to the Mac and then let it update itself for iOS build and not make any changes directly to the GitHub repository from MacOS?

    I'm curious how others who are not Apple people have handled this as well.

    Thanks.