Hi everyone, Things are moving along and I'm spending more time developing for iOS now. I'm using a cloud-based service, still, but, it is getting less enjoyable and I am considering buying a machine to develop for iOS. I am in the UK and Apple machines are very expensive here. I've been researching about buying a second-hand machine, possibly. It's very confusing and the quality of the information on the Internet is dubious at best. Basically, I need to know how to spot a Mac Mini that operate Xcode 5 efficiently and with the chance of it having a reasonable lifespan before it becomes obsolete for development purposes. However, I understand that I need a machine that operates 10.9.x Mavericks or 10.8.4/Mountain Lion as a minimum. I don't really understand what Mavericks is but I do understand that it is now available free. See http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/ So, I've been looking for a Mac mini with 10.8.4/Mountain Lion as a minimum. However, I see some machines with Mavericks installed on them and I do not know if I can run Xcode5 with such a machine. Can I do so? Also, is it possible to upgrade a slightly older machine to Mavericks and then use it for Xcode 5? Please see http://www.apple.com/uk/osx/how-to-upgrade/ I am quite confused about the whole Mavericks or 10.8.4/Mountain Lion as a minimum thing so if I would value any clarification as to what it all means. Many thanks for all your help, as always, folks. Kind regards, John PS It's a Bank Holiday weekend here in the UK. The sun is shining outside. This is a happy but highly unusual combination of events. Enjoy it if you happen to be here.

Higgey, I'm also in the UK. Some rare sun shine!!! If you want to buy a mac, of which ever kind, I suggest you look on apples online shop and find the "refurbished" section. The machines on there, if they have what you want, can be much reduced in price, while being essentially as new. That's what I did after spending weeks looking on eBay. The bloody things hold their value so much, you pay almost as much on ebay for a 2 year old machine as you pay for an apple-refurbished one. Mavericks and Mountain Lion are just Apple's operating systems, Mavericks being the latest one. I'm on Mountain Lion and xcode 5 runs fine on it. I could upgrade for free to Mavericks. Some say it's great and others have rubbished it. I'm not usually an early-adopter, so I'm waiting to see. Of course xcode 5 will also run on Mavericks.

John, Mavericks is the name for the newest current Mac OSX which is numbered 10.9. If you buy a machine with 10.8.4 you should be able to upgrade it with no problem through the Mac App Store which you will find in the dock of any mac. My main development Mac is a Mac mini. I bought it in Jan 2013. It was running 10.8 Mountain Lion when I bought it. I upgraded it for free last fall to 10.9. It runs great. The best thing about a mac mini is that you can upgrade the ram yourself. I bought my mini with 4 GB of ram and purchases 16GB of ram from Amazon for $90. I installed it myself in less than 10 minutes. The hardest part was getting the plastic cover on the bottom of my mini off. There are how-to videos on YouTube on how to upgrade ram on a mac mini. @Stobe shared this awesome website at Buzzcon 14 last Saturday: <a href="http://www.mac2sell.net" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.mac2sell.net</a>. It allows you to find the fair market value for a used mac based upon your country.

I was having this very conversation with my good friend Arne last year at the meetups. It really does depend on what you wish to do with it. Arne never told me what he was going to do with it, so we all told him that if he wants a new one, get the bottom spec. Later, he said he planned to use it for advanced graphic video editing, and the Mac Mini would be good for the job, however he would have preferred to get the higher spec. It's probably going to become your primary computer. At least if there's a Windows-thingy in the household, your Mac mini will certainly become your computer for everything. My philosophy is buy from Apple. It might be expensive but the customer support is fantastic and after all, you can trust them. A random guy on eBay has likely taken out the hard disk (this is very common when selling computers). I would say that in the refurb section you can get some good deals. Certainly, that's where I bought my mac. Any spec that Apple provide will do the job perfectly. But it goes whiteout saying that the more you pay, the more you get. If you're looking for good speed, look fro some with 'Fusion Drives' or 'SSD' drives

Totally off topic (sorry) but my first attempt of buying a new mac ended with me being defrauded out of hundreds of pounds on ebay. The guy had hacked someone else's account and I was stupid enough to fall for it and paid by bank transfer. Now I know that this is a common con but at the time, I couldn't imagine that a fraudster could just use a bank account with a normal UK high street bank for receiving proceeds of crime. I thought surely the police would immediately find out who the account holder is and knock on their door. Wrong! The police weren't remotely interested in doing anything about it. That was also the moment I lost any remaining respect for "the system".

Higgey, you are probably, (like me) an MS Windows PC user. Apple seem to have a policy of trying to move its users onto the latest software environments. As an example, when they bring out a new version of their operating system, they make a decision about which apple hardware it will work (and not work with). Which means old hardware doesn't support always the latest operating systems. Maybe they want you to have the best user experience and so they draw the line for you and help you decide on upgrading your hardware. I find that Microsoft, for all their sins, allow their operating systems run slowly on old slow hardware and don't try to control the overall experience. The issue is compounded when Apple bring out a new version of xcode, they make the decision on which versions of the mac operating system it will work on. And you find that only the latest xcode supports the latest ios (and quietly dropped support for the oldest ios), so you need to upgrade to keep your dev environment up to date. Probably xcode supports the latest mac operating system and then the one before that. So that makes you upgrade the OS. And if the latest OS doesn't run on your hardware, it makes you upgrade that, which is where we came in. I suspect this is not really a technical decision, it is more part of the ethos of keeping you up with the latest. My only real interest in upgrading my mac is to maintain my xcode environment. I only use mine for apple development, nothing else. I don't mind macs, I just prefer Windows. So how does this answer your question? Well, philosophically, I'd say the latest mac hardware will always have the longest usable lifespan, because new hardware is higher spec than the model it replaces. So buy the newest you can. It might be graphics or memory or CPU that ultimately forces the upgrade but it seems that at some point, Apple will find a way of making your old mac suddenly not useful for development and make you buy are newer one. MAC memory is cheaper if you fit it yourself, so buying an entry level and upgrading it can be a good option. And I've noticed ebay macs are cheaper in USA than UK. Alan

AlanMac, I don't know about xcode compatibility but before I got involved with apps, I had my macbook for seven years and was still happy with it.

This app for your Mac, iPad or iPhone can be handy to learn the specifics about a particular Mac model. http://mactracker.ca/ He really should have used BuzzTouch for this app. (But then it would need modification to run on Mac) A general rule of thumb, stay with Macs of vintage 2011 or newer. My MacBook Pro is from 2010. It runs fine with Xcode 5 after maxing out the RAM in it. I suspect that Xcode 6 may not run on that vintage, keeping my fingers crossed! My personal bias is to only buy laptops for their portability to another room, to the car, to the office, to a friend, to the coffee shop, to the Apple Store, and to Buzzdays! :-) -- Niraj

Thanks everyone for your brilliant contributions. Lots of help for which I am most grateful. kingelessar - Thanks for the tips and the info. Sorry to hear about the defraud incident. I'll proceed with caution.... bfoutty - Great info. I've looked at mac2sell.net and I am grateful to know about the memory upgrade details. Thomas Boyd - Hi Thomas. You do realise that my iOS developing is all because you organised buzzday Oxford and David Book made me think "I can do iOS" don't you? I would never have tried otherwise....I am deeply indebted to you. Thanks for the buying tips. AlanMac - Thank you for the insight. Useful stuff. Buying in the USA for the using in the UK? Interesting idea. I’ll have to think about power supply/will I be able to resell if needed/what if the machine arrives and it is no good. I will research the prices on ebay.com and look into it. Any thoughts from anyone about this would be appreciated. Niraj Shah - Great website! I've noted it. I appreciate the specific advice about not going earlier than 2011. I'll do as you say. Phew! Thanks again everyone, I really am most grateful. I'll be researching this and giving it more thought this week. Enjoy what's left of the Bank Holiday if you are in the UK...... John (iOS Developer, no less, and I never imagined I would be able to say that!)

An update for anyone else wondering about buying a mac: I researched ebay and other places for a secondhand mac but the prices were just extraordinarily high. I watched the apple store refurbed department everyday and, after a long time, I spotted a refurbed mac mini. This was around the same price as a secondhand one but came with a full guarantee and was basically as new. I also got support - which I needed - and it has worked out well. Quite an investment in time getting set up and learning the mac way of doing things but it has made developing for iOS much easier than using the cloud. My mac mini has only 4GB of Ram but it runs Xcode 5 perfectly and it is quite fast enough for me. It does slow down a little when I have a lot of apps open but I do not normally let this happen. Thanks to everyone for your advice given above. I had not got a clue and your help was invaluable :) John

A good tip might be to invest yourself in an SSD hard drive. I bought one for my MacBook and although it was already really quick, it sped it up by about 5 or 6 times. Stunning. But if you're finding that it only slows down when lots of programs are open, this is the sign that you don't have enough RAM. Ram is easily bought off eBay for about £20-£30. This will mean the Mac will be capable of running all sorts of programs at once.

Thanks, Thomas. Most appreciated.