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2013 MacBook 15 inch Pro ($3400) VS 2017 Acer Apire E 15 inch ($350) Laptop
When you first get into game development with Unity, there is so much to learn. So many questions that need answers can make the whole ordeal seem unassailable. All you want to do is to start coding and make some characters move! You should, however spend some time contemplating the trade offs between using a Mac vs PC as development machine as your decision will have huge impacts on possible future time and money wasted.
I will focus my discussion on laptops as most developers these days want to work remotely, but much of what we will discuss can transcend to desktops.
Price, Deployment Platforms, and Inherent MacOS vs Windows Optimizations
Unfortunately as you can see, the good folks at Unity do not list hardware specs!!! They just list software specs so finding a cheap laptop that meets their minimum software requirements is a little tricky…
However, when you go to the Unity Download page, we do get a little bit of extra information regarding the GPU ( Graphics Processing Unit or Graphics Card):
“GPU: Graphics card with DX9 (shader model 2.0) capabilities. Anything made since 2004 should work.”
So we should be able to run Unity on any new PC Laptop or MacBook. The question is, however, how well will it perform on various platforms? Well that is why I am here, to do that work for you and save you time. I actually went and purchased a 4.0/5.0 star rated entry-level $350 Acer laptop on Amazon for this session and ran some benchmarks (with video) that you can compare against my 2013 (originally $3400) Macbook Pro. This should give you an idea of what is possible between these two extremes and make an informed decision to make your computer purchase.
That being said, there are certain price brackets that will obviously limit your options. For instance, if you don’t have at least $850 to purchase a refurbished MacBook (I recommend saving money and purchasing refurbished MacBooks due to extensive testing and awesome warranties), then you will have to go the PC route and all the talk of Mac vs PC goes out the window.
So let’s approach this discussion by listing our options in price brackets.
$300-$400
If you can only afford a $300 machine at this point, I advise you to buy a low end PC and start coding. This will exclude you from being able to purchase a Mac and thus not be able to build iOS apps. That is ok for now. Don’t waste time. Knowledge is king and the sooner you start building that game dev experience the better off you will be in the long run. I have tried many laptops and really believe in Acer laptops when it comes to the less expensive laptops. Your money goes further.
I recommend the Acer Aspire E 15. This machine features the following:
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15.6-Inch FHD Screen – Nice and big for having better workflows in Unity. You generally want more space to position your windows so you could have multiple views like the Hierarchy, Game, Inspector, Console and Project views.
Unity 3D Screen Layouts
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CPU – Intel Core i3-813OU 8th Generation – Not a bad CPU for the price of this laptop.
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Memory – 6G
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Hard Drive – 1TB 5400RPM HD – You get 1TB of space so you can save those big project files. Unless you go crazy with your projects you should never run out of space. That being said, I recommend you rather opt up for a solid state drive (SSD) as this will dramatically increase the performance of Unity and other programs on your laptop. You see the hard drive will be the bottle neck on this computer since it spins at a very slow 5400 RPM speed instead of moving data at the speed of electricity. SSD drives are coming down in price, but you will get only 128GB’s for around the same price of a 1TB 5400 RPM drive. I would recommend going the SSD route. You don’t need that much space to begin with and the gain in performance will enhance your game development experience. I did notice a slowdown in I/O when downloading the initial Unity software and setting up the laptop. Once the software was running in memory, things went ok, but the spinning hard drive is definitely the bottle neck on this laptop.
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Graphics Card – Intel HD Graphics 620 – This is a low-level integrated graphics card that is built into the motherboard. It supports DirectX 12 so we can run Unity. Due to the lack of dedicated graphics memory, this card will draw memory from the system-shared 4GB DDR4. It meets the minimum requirements for Unity so you are good to go building games that are not too graphics intensive, otherwise you might see some slow downs. You can read more about this graphics card here.
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Operating System – Windows 10 Home – The laptop features Windows 10 Home that works great with Unity.
My Benchmark Results for the $350 Acer Aspire 15:
I ran my benchmarks on Unity version 2017.2.0f3
I made a video of launching Unity and running the demo “Standard Assets Example Project” and running WebGL benchmark tests that the folks at Unity Technologies use when porting Unity to a new platform.
The Acer laptop performed well beyond my expectations on the demo project included in Unity. I was actually really surprised. With only $350 you can get a decent setup hardware wise and start your game studio. How crazy is that!
$400-$700
Go for the $600 Acer Aspire E 15 , 8th Gen Intel Core i5, GeForce MX 150, 15.6” Full HD, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Win 10, E5-575G-75MD
The major upgrades you get over the $350 model are:
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CPU – 8th Gen Intel Core i5 – The latest and greatest in the line of Intel processors giving you a very strong work horse.
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Graphics Card –GeForce MX 150with 2GB Video Memory – You get a dedicated GPU with it’s own super fast memory.
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Memory – 8GB DDR4 Memory – Ample memory for running Unity plus other graphics or possibly 3D editing software at the same time.
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256GB SSD – You now move away from the slow spinning 5400 and 7200 RPM hard drives and get access to a super fast solid state drive. All your software will thank you for this wise decision and your laptop startup time will be much faster.
$850-$1200 (Enter the MacOS VS Windows Discussion)
This is where we can start talking about Mac VS PC. Unless you need to run a specific Windows-only software like 3D Studio Max (You could actually do a dual boot configuration on your Mac and run both Windows and MacOS), I highly recommend purchasing a Mac over a PC for the following reasons:
1. Security – To my knowledge I have not had a virus on my Macbook Pro. A big contributing factor is that there are just less MacOS users browsing the Internet so it is not worth the time for hackers to build viruses that target a smaller community. Also, I have not seen any slow downs on my MacBook due to malware in the past 4 years. Windows also has something known as DLL Hel due to the complexity of their DLL ecosystem in trying to provide backwards compatibility for older API’s creating many loopholes for hackers to exploit. The folks at Apple generally keep marching forward and the underlying Linux and Unix roots make for a harder to violate the machine.
I also work extensively on $2000 PC’s and I am always so saddened by slow downs I get around the second week into running the system. I have to load heavy Antivirus software, Malware Software and the overhead of Windows eats up about 30% of your computer resources. Also the registry in Windows can slow things down over time as each piece of software loads tons of entries in there that need to be searched.
2. Beautiful Screens – Apple Retina screens are beautiful to look at…little gifts for your strained eyes. If you look at the side by side comparison of the laptops screenshot at the top of this post, you can see the nice contrast of the retina display compared to the Acer’s.
3. You can deploy to iOS!!! This is probably the biggest reason I would say go the Mac route. There is no work-around for being able to deploy to iOS…you need a Mac. Sorry.
If you are in the mobile space, you need to be on iOS, especially if you want to make a living from your games. My Unity game Animal Rampage has had months when it generated $1000 on the iOS App store. The most I’ve made on Google Play (Android) was $20 a month. What a huge difference! You see, people trust the iOS app store more due to the difficult submission process Apple places on 3rd party developers and the resulting virus-free, generally higher quality games. It usually takes me 7-14 days to push a game through the submission process. On Google Play my game should be live withing 24 hours. There are less checks and balances at Google Play and the end user, the customer is the one that suffers from lower quality, sometimes virus-infected apps. Thus they loose some confidence in the store and are less likely to dish out money for your game. Furthermore, iPhone users just seem to be more inclined to spend money on a cool game or app. They also spend more money on expensive iPhones. Get a MacBook so you don’t loose out on this amazing market.
I originally paid $3400 for this MacBook Pro. It has been the best investment I’ve every made in any computer. Four years later, this laptop is still running super fast and allowing me to work very fast in Unity. I love my laptop. I usually get a new laptop every 5 years, but I might keep this one for 6-7 years. I just looked up the price of my machine on eBay and is now selling for around $500. I don’t recommend buying an older 2013 laptop from 3rd parties, instead take a look at newer, 13″ refurbished MacBook Pro’s for around $1100. If that is too pricy, go for 13″ MacBook Air for around $850.
So my 2013 Macbook Pro features the following:
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CPU – 2.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz) with 6MB shared L3 cache
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Memory – 16GB of 1600MHz DDR3L onboard memory
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Hard Drive – 512 GB SSD
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GPU – 2 Video cards – Intel HD Graphics 4000 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory and automatic graphics switching
Benchmark Results:
I ran my benchmarks on Unity version 2017.2.0f3
I made a video of launching Unity and running the demo “Standard Assets Example Project” and then ran the WebGL benchmark tests that the folks at Unity use when porting Unity to new platform.
The final results on my 2013 Macbook Pro…84942 points:
Conclusion
When you start out developing games in Unity, you should start with simple, manageable games. This way you can build confidence and quickly see results and most importantly finish projects. Finishing a game / project is the most important step in becoming a game developer. So keep it simple. Keeping it simple means no AI or heavy graphics to begin with. You don’t need a super fast computer get into Unity game development. Don’t let the price of an expensive computer hold you back. If you have the money, by all means go ahead and purchase a MacBook Pro so you have the iOS deployment option in your future and generally a more optimized computer for your Unity workflow.
Last modified: July 17, 2018
