Mac Mini For Development
Create even more powerful Mac versions of your iPad apps. Apps built with Mac Catalyst now take on the new look of macOS Big Sur and help you better define the look and behavior of your apps. You can choose to turn off automatic scaling of iPad controls and layout, allowing you to precisely place every pixel on the screen. The Mac Mini actually got an update! It now comes in Space Grey, has new internals and your choices have never been more difficult in around the $1000 price.
macOS Big Sur takes the most advanced operating system in the world to a whole new level of power and beauty, making your apps look better than ever on an all-new interface. New widget features and the new widget gallery help you deliver more value to your users. Adding intelligence to your apps with machine learning is even simpler and more extensive with new tools, models, training capabilities, and APIs. You can create more powerful Mac versions of your iPad apps with Mac Catalyst. And you can now easily bring your extensions to Safari — and to the App Store.
All-new Interface
- Jun 24, 2020 Instead, developers should contact Apple support, and the company will ship a replacement Mac mini if necessary. Apple has many other strict rules in place for the A12Z-based Mac mini.
- Dec 24, 2014 In our web development company every developer works on a Mac mini, full specked version. We threw out all of our noisy PCs and now we can work on much quieter environment.
- Though Mac mini still has some use as a Mac server, or as a gateway Mac drug for PC switchers, when it comes to more intensive work you’ll inevitably choose a higher-end Mac or an iOS device.
macOS Big Sur brings a new design that’s been finely tuned for the powerful features that make a Mac a Mac. Core features, such as the menu bar and Dock, take advantage of the large Mac display, with translucent backings and spacious pull-down menus. The new Control Center, designed just for Mac, provides quick access to controls while keeping the menu bar clutter-free. Notification Center puts recent notifications and powerful new widgets together in a single view for at-a-glance information as you work. And a streamlined new design for apps features full-height sidebars and integrated toolbar buttons.
Mac App Development
Widgets
Easily build widgets using the WidgetKit framework and the new widget API for SwiftUI. Widgets now come in multiple sizes, and users can visit the new widget gallery to search, preview sizes, and add them to Notification Center to access important details at a glance.
Safari Extensions
With support for the popular WebExtension API, it’s even easier to bring powerful extensions to Safari. Xcode 12 even includes a porting tool to streamline the process.
The new Extensions category on the Mac App Store showcases Safari extensions, with editorial spotlights and top charts to help users discover and download great extensions from the developer community.
Machine Learning
With macOS Big Sur, creating apps that leverage the power of machine learning is even easier and more extensive with additional tools in Core ML for model deployment, new models and training capabilities in Create ML, more APIs for vision and natural language, and improved resources for training on Mac and converting models to Core ML format.
Mac Catalyst
Create even more powerful Mac versions of your iPad apps. Apps built with Mac Catalyst now take on the new look of macOS Big Sur and help you better define the look and behavior of your apps. You can choose to turn off automatic scaling of iPad controls and layout, allowing you to precisely place every pixel on the screen. Provide full control of your app using just the keyboard, take advantage of the updated Photos picker, access more iOS frameworks, and more.
User privacy on the App Store.
Later this year, the Mac App Store will help users understand apps’ privacy practices. You’ll need to enter your privacy practice details into App Store Connect for display on your product page.
Universal App Quick Start Program
Get your apps ready for Apple Silicon Macs. Create next-generation Universal apps that take full advantage of the capabilities the new architecture has to offer. Get all the tools, resources, support, and even access to prototype hardware you’ll need. You can also watch a collection of videos from WWDC20 to help you get started.
Tools and resources
Use Xcode 12 beta and these resources to build apps for macOS Big Sur.
I have been using a Mac mini to port my C++/Qt based code to Mac OS X for the last 3.5 years. This is one of the early PowerPC based Mac minis, upgraded to 1GB of RAM. Being Apple hardware, it is expensive for what you get. But it has served me well. The small form factor (approx 17 x 17 x 5 cm) has also been useful in my cramped office, where I have it attached to the same monitor, mouse and keyboard as my Windows box through a KVM switch. But it is struggling to keep up with PerfectTablePlan’s ever increasing code base. A clean build of the PerfectTablePlan source into a Universal (fat) binary now takes an eye-watering 36 minutes to compile and link on the Mac mini. Building a PowerPC-only debug version still takes nearly half that time. That is painful, even just for occasional porting work.
As my main development environment is Windows, I can’t really justify the cost (or office space requirements) of a Mac Pro. So I decided to buy a new Mac mini, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I did look around to see if I could find one at a discount. However, this being Apple hardware, no-one dares sell at anything significantly less than Apple’s RRP. I bought the smaller (120GB) disk variant and had the dealer upgrade it to 2GB RAM, which tests on my old Mac mini indicated should be plenty for compiling and linking. I didn’t want to do the memory upgrade myself as I know, from experience with my first Mac mini, that removing the case involves putty knives and some very worrying cracking noises.
I had all sorts of problems trying to get the right cables. Firstly I wanted a Firewire cable so I could copy the set-up across from the old machine to the new machine using Apple’s Migration Assistant software. But it turns out that the old Mac Mini has a Firewire 400 6-pin socket, whereas the new Mac Mini has a Firewire 800 9-pin socket. I ordered a 6-pin to 9-pin Firewire cable cable. Then I discovered that there is more than one type of DVI cable. The old Mac mini was attached to my KVM switch with a DVI-I cable. The new Mac mini only accepts mini-DVI or (via a supplied adaptor) DVI-D. So I ordered a dual link DVI-D to DVI-D cable as well.
Mac Mini For Android Development
Once I had the right cables things went relatively smoothly. The Migration Assistant software copied almost all the apps and data across from the old machine to the new one. It even preserved settings for the apps, e.g. the email accounts in my Thunderbird email client. I just had to re-install XCode (which wasn’t copied across) and rebuild my Qt libraries (to avoid copious warnings due to the fact they had been built with an earlier version of XCode/gcc).
To use the migration assistant you simply:
- connect the 2 machines with a Firewire cable
- start-up the old machine with the ‘T’ key depresses to put it in ‘Target’ mode
- start-up the new machine
- follow the on-screen instructions
Nice. If only it was was that easy to set-up a new Windows machine.
Mac Mini For Web Development
A quick test shows that the new Mac mini is nearly 6 times faster at compiling and linking a Universal binary of PerfectTablePlan from scratch[1]:
The time the new Mac mini takes to compile and link an Intel-only debug release of PerfectTablePlan also compares favourably with a similar build on my Windows 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo box with 4GB of RAM[2].
This isn’t a fair hardware comparison, as the two machines are using completely different compilers and linkers and the Windows box was running various background services. But it certainly shows that Intel-based Mac minis are worth considering for use as development machines.
[1] The newer machine is using a newer version of XCode/gcc.
[2] The Windows box is using Visual Studio 2005.