Mac Book Apps For Graphing

Mar 14, 2019 congratulations, VVI (developer)!! I was highly interested in this app but ignored it since it was on the app store only. If there is an upcoming move to provide apps again from dev's web sites, than you are one of the pioneers; seen that Apple offers their latest operating system os x 10.6.7 from MacUpdate, whereas tiny tools are available from the app store only, is a piece of insanity. Buy from Apple from £1,249/$1,299. Also available from KRCS, Currys PC World, John Lewis and more. The MacBook Pro is Apple’s professional line of laptops, however, there is a big.

Many 15-inch MacBook Pro notebooks have two graphics processors (GPU)—a discrete GPU and an integrated GPU. The discrete GPU provides substantial graphics performance but uses more energy. The integrated GPU optimizes battery life by using less energy.

Check if the discrete or integrated GPU is in use

To see which graphics cards are in use, choose Apple () menu > About this Mac. The graphics cards currently in use appear next to Graphics. Learn which integrated GPUs your Mac might have.

Check if an app is using the dedicated GPU

To see if an app is using the higher-performance discrete GPU, open Activity Monitor and click the Energy tab. If you don't see the Requires High Perf GPU column, your computer only has one graphics processor.

In this example, iMovie and Final Cut Pro are using the higher-performance discrete GPU:

Learn more

Here are a few examples of apps and accessories that use the higher-performance discrete GPU:

iMovie
Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign
An external display

Learn how to use an external graphics processor (eGPU) with your Mac.

Learn how to set the graphics performance on your MacBook Pro or MacBook Pro with Retina display computer.

How fast does your MacBook need to be to comfortably code iOS apps with Xcode? Is a MacBook Pro from 2-3 years ago good enough to learn Swift programming? Let’s find out!

Here’s what we’ll get into:

The minimum/recommended system requirements for Xcode 11
Why you need – or don’t need – a fancy $3.000 MacBook Pro
Which second-hand Macs can run Xcode OK, and how you can find out

I’ve answered a lot of “Is my MacBook good enough for iOS development and/or Xcode?”-type questions on Quora. A few of the most popular models include:

Not endorsed by Apple Inc.IOS is a trademark or registered trademark of Cisco in the U.S. And other countries and is used under license.BlackBerry and the BlackBerry logo are registered with the U.S. Download app infuse for mac. Patent and Trademark Office and may be pending or registered in other countries - these marks are used under license.

The 3rd- and 4th-gen MacBook Pro, with 2.4+ GHz Intel Core i5, i7, i9 CPUs
The 2nd-gen MacBook Air, with the 1.4+ GHz Intel Core i5 CPUs
The 4th-generation iMac, with the 2.7+ GHz Intel Core i5 and i7 CPUs

These models aren’t the latest, that’s for sure. Are they good enough to code iOS apps? And what about learning how to code? We’ll find out in this article.

My Almost-Unbreakable 2013 MacBook Air

Since 2009 I’ve coded more than 50 apps for iOS, Android and the mobile web. Most of those apps, including all apps I’ve created between 2013 and 2018, were built on a 13″ MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM and a 1.3 GHz Intel i5 CPU.

My first MacBook was the gorgeous, then-new MacBook White unibody (2009), which I traded in for a faster but heavier MacBook Pro (2011), which I traded in for that nimble workhorse, the mighty MacBook Air (2013). In 2018 I upgraded to a tricked out 13″ MacBook Pro, with much better specs.

Apps

Frankly, that MacBook Air from 2013 felt more sturdy and capable than my current MacBook Pro. After 5 years of daily intenstive use, the MacBook Air’s battery is only through 50% of its max. cycle count. It’s still going strong after 7 hours on battery power.

In 2014, my trusty MacBook Air broke down on a beach in Thailand, 3 hours before a client deadline, with the next Apple Store 500 kilometer away. It turned out OK, of course. Guess what? My current MacBook Pro from 2018, its keyboard doesn’t even work OK, I’ve had sound recording glitches, and occasionally the T2 causes a kernel panic. Like many of us, I wish we had 2013-2015 MacBook Air’s and Pro’s with today’s specs. Oh, well…

Learn how to build iOS apps

Get started with iOS 13 and Swift 5

That 100 Mhz i486 PC I Learned to Code With

When I was about 11 years old I taught myself to code in BASIC, on a 100 Mhz i486 PC that was given to me by friends. It had a luxurious 16 MB of RAM, initially only ran MS-DOS, and later ran Windows 3.1 and ’95.

A next upgrade came as a 400 Mhz AMD desktop, given again by friends, on which I ran a local EasyPHP webserver that I used to learn web development with PHP, MySQL and HTML/CSS. I coded a mod for Wolfenstein 3D on that machine, too.

Mac Book Apps For Graphing

We had no broadband internet at home back then, so I would download and print out coding tutorials at school. At the one library computer that had internet access, and I completed the tutorials at home. The source codes of turn-based web games, JavaScript tidbits and HTML page snippets were carried around on a 3.5″ floppy disk.

Later, when I started coding professionally around age 17, I finally bought my first laptop. My own! I still remember how happy I was. I got my first gig as a freelance coder: creating a PHP script that would aggregate RSS feeds, for which I earned about a hundred bucks. Those were the days!

Xcode, iOS, Swift and The MacBook Pro

The world is different today. Xcode simply doesn’t run on an i486 PC, and you can’t save your app’s source code on a 1.44 MB floppy disk anymore. Your Mac probably doesn’t have a CD drive, and you store your Swift code in a cloud-based Git repository somewhere.

Make no mistake: owning a MacBook is a luxury. Not because learning to code was harder 15 years ago, and not because computers were slower back then. It’s because kids these days learn Python programming on a $25 Raspberry Pi.

I recently had a conversation with a young aspiring coder, who complained he had no access to “decent” coding tutorials and mentoring, despite owning a MacBook Pro and having access to the internet. Among other things, I wrote the following:

You’re competing with a world of people that are smarter than you, and have better resources. You’re also competing against coders that have had it worse than you. They didn’t win despite adversity, but because of it. Do you give up? NO! You work harder. It’s the only thing you can do: work harder than the next person. When their conviction is wavering, you dig in your heels, you keep going, you persevere, and you’ll win.

Winning in this sense isn’t like winning a race, of course. You’re not competing with anyone else; you’re only really up against yourself. If you want to learn how to code, don’t dawdle over choosing a $3.000 or a $2.900 laptop. If anything, it’ll keep you from developing the grit you need to learn coding.

Great ideas can change the world, but only if they’re accompanied by deliberate action. Likewise, simply complaining about adversity isn’t going to create opportunities for growth – unless you take action. I leapfrogged my way from one hand-me-down computer to the next. I’m not saying you should too, but I do want to underscore how it helped me develop character.

If you want to learn how to code, welcome adversity. Be excellent because of it, or despite it, and never give up. Start coding today! Don’t wait until you’ve got all your ducks in a row.

Which MacBook is Fast Enough for Xcode 11?

The recommended system specs to run Xcode 11 are:

A Mac with macOS Catalina (10.15.2) for Xcode 11.5 or macOS Mojave (10.14.4) for Xcode 11.0 (see alternatives for PC here)
At least an Intel i5- or i7-equivalent CPU, so about 2.0 GHz should be enough
At least 8 GB of RAM, but 16 GB lets you run more apps at the same time
At least 256 GB disk storage, although 512 GB is more comfortable
You’ll need about 8 GB of disk space, but Xcode’s intermediate files can take up to 10-30 GB of extra disk space

Looking for a second-hand Mac? The following models should be fast enough for Xcode, but YMMV!