Game Development on Macbook

Hey, I was wondering if Unity runs fine on the 13" MacBook Pro 2012
If not can u suggest a better MacBook that will run Unity just fine pls
Thanks in advance

 

It will run fine by itself. But it depends on what your expectation of "fine" is and the expected size and complexity of the project. I assume you don't have that MacBook yet, otherwise you could just give it a try. But if you can I would try for a better MacBook. Newer models are generally better but it also depends on the specs (CPU, GPU, RAM, Disk).

 

Thanks for the reply!
The specs of the one I was talking about are:
Intel Core i5 2,5 GHz dual Core
8Gb Ram 1600Mhz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 Mb

 

And with "fine" I mean no stutter or crashing or something like that, I know it probably won't deal well with big projects, I am looking for small projects just to get started

 

Dual-core with HD Graphics 4000 is probably not good enough and there's a certain risk with faulty/incomplete HD Graphics drivers specifically on Mac. The HD Graphics 4xxx series is riddled with gaming issues in my experience.

And then there's the issue of OS support, I suppose such an old MacBook is not eligible for using the OS X version required by Unity (2020.3 in this link which is the oldest Unity version that's still officially supported).

My Macbook Pro (quad core, 16gb, dedicated GPU) is from 2015-ish and it doesn't get the latest OS X updates anymore but it still ran Unity 2019/2020 quite well in 2022. If you go for Non-Pro I'd say you'd have to have a model that's at least 2-3 years younger, or go for a MacBook Pro of about that year, depending on what you can get (cheaper).

 

No. I've been working with an M1 Mac Mini (16GB RAM) with a work project (a prototype) and it's sluggish. Tasks take at least two to three times as long as it takes my PC (5950X w/ 64GB RAM) and tasks that are multithreaded are even slower. For a machine that old it would be far worse.

Between the OS, Unity, and a couple support apps (Dropbox and Synergy), memory usage is around 8 GB. That machine would already be out of memory and depending on the swap which a machine that old likely means an HDD. You can upgrade both the memory and storage drive though which is a plus of old models.

What can't be upgraded like @CodeSmile mentioned is the OS which leads to another problem: a minimum release of Xcode is required to submit to the App Store which requires a minimum release of macOS. Currently Xcode 14.1 is required which requires macOS 12.5. That machine is locked to 10.15. It can't be used to submit apps.

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=jd9wcyov

 

if you're just learning, and dedicated to learning Unity, you could run 2017's Unity, for the first year of learning, well and truly long enough to see if you like working in Unity. And that laptop should sing along just fine for most learning tasks. For code editing, you can and probably should use Sublime, as this is light and fast, and had good enough code completion back around that era.

 

Back in the day, that laptop with more RAM would be fine for Unity versions released around the same time.

Today, as Ryiah mentioned, you likely can't publish a game using XCode. Because of the lack of OS updates, my university won't allow that laptop to hook up to the network.

Bottom line is no, it's probably not going to run Unity well.

 

I’ve used it a little on my MacBook and for the most part it’s the same experience as a windows machine.

I prefer the workflow tools on a MacBook so I’d say it’s better in that regard, but my PC is more powerful so there’s that in opposition.

 

small addendum: It's better to run Unity on an Intel Mac in Windows, via Bootcamp, if you can.

In any version of MacOS with Intel CPUs and any variation of GPU, the thing will get so hot it throttles all the time during any time in Play Mode. This will drive you nuts.

In Windows, via Bootcamp, that throttling won't kick in.

 

I use a MBA 2015 w/ only 4GB of RAM updated to Ventura with OC and Xcode runs just fine.