I’m currently in the Play Store Closed Testing saga and hoping to publish my Android App in the next week or two. Then I need to turn my attention to porting it to iPhone and I believe that I have no choice but to purchase an Apple Mac for this.
I was hoping for some advice on what to get.
I have a nice KVM setup which I use with my PC and laptop and have a spare channel I could use for it. So I was think about getting an “Apple 2023 Mac mini desktop computer with Apple M2 chip with 8‑core CPU and 10‑core GPU, 8GB Unified Memory, 256GB SSD storage”.
Would this be powerful enough, or should I get something better?
I could also afford a “2024 MacBook Air 13-inch Laptop with M3 chip” buit wouldn’t want to go much higher than this in terms of price.
I figured I’d get a refurbished iPhone a couple of years old for testing.
Any advice would be welcome.
Yes. That’s enough to build iOS apps but I would recommend getting 16GB memory if you can afford it.
On my machine after a full days of ios simulator debug builds, Xojo generally uses 6-10GB of memory.
Any Apple Silicon Mac (M-series chips) will be okay - but naturally, the more recent, the better. Likewise with RAM, 8GB will work, but 16GB will be better, especially if you want to keep using it in a few years.
It’s an open secret that there’s an Apple event coming up before the end of October, likely including M4 Mac minis. The event is unlikely to include MacBook Airs, however. Even if you don’t want to pay for the latest and greatest, it may be worth waiting just a little longer to see what is released. Previous generation hardware is often discounted when new models come along.
Any Mac with an M chip will do fine. Just make sure you get more memory than you think you need. 
16GB minimum, 32 GB would be better.
One thing to note: virtualization on the Mac is very good and you could easily host an Arm-based version of Windows or Linux on a Mac - this comes in very handy for cross-platform work. What could you do with a light, fast, high-quality laptop or desktop that runs macOS, Windows, and Linux without missing a beat?
I would recommend to wait two weeks to see what Apple announces before Christmas.
Then either grab something older from a sale or get the new one.
Good tip thanks
Thanks Eric. I have a few machines running Windows & Linux, but I guess it’s useful to have everything on one device.
this could be quickly full and for my experience extern ssd (Samsung T9) does not work well together.
I have 512 GB AND YES, IT CAN BE QUICKLY FULL…
But I do not have troubles with external SSD (except speed because of the hub and the SSD speeds)… no usbc port availlable when on power supply and USB type A is slow with … HDs.
You can rent mac OS time as needed at EC2 Amazon EC2 Mac Instances - Amazon Web Services I haven’t tried the mac version of EC2.
Also if you google it is possible to get macos running in a VirtualBox or vmware VM but not supported by Apple obviously.
A 512GB SSD will be noticeably faster, but you may not care.
I’m not looking to do anything other than development on it. I can see why I would need plenty of RAM, but why would 512GB be such an improvement on 256GB SSD?
Do Apple switch up the drive quality when you go for the larger sized?
Prior to Apple Silicon, sometimes the smaller SSDs are older models and the larger the latest faster versions.
I see - thanks 
Always get double min HD size as a minimum. If min size is 256Gig it will be 1 stick of hd, if you have 512, you get 2 x 256 gigs of hd and can write a lot faster. It might be in raid, not sure.
Just a side note from an old guy (o;
Many commercials apps in the past made me feel that they developed and tested it at that time with the fastest machine available…
Then you as a customer with a lower budget is suddenly confronted with a poor performance (o;
A fast machine is great for development…but never forget the people who can‘t afford a fast machine.
A very good example on macOS is Autodesk Fusion360. Takes even ages to start on my MacStudio with 64GB RAM.
I think it was on the https://www.macrumors.com/ site a few articles talking about how the 256 drives for the M-series are using slower components than the 512’s.
Edited to add 256 slower Search Results
In the past, I believe Apple used a single data “channel” for the 256GB and a dual channel for the 512GB and up.
This is correct. One channel per 256GB chip, so the bigger drives get more bandwidth.
You are talking about 256GB SSD, but MacBook Air is the only one to have that. MacBook Pro starts with a512 GB SSD; I do not checked iMac nor Mac Mini…