If i need to get an apple computer just to build for ios devices, what would be the cheapest device devrant would recommend if i'll i'm going to do with it is compile simple iphone apps, and compile unity games to work on ios.

I've once bought the cheapest Mac mini for Xamarin, that thing was so incredibly slow... Don't know how they fucked up a Unix so much... Today I am using a VM on VMware for building. Techsviewer.com once had ready images to download including the patch you have to install for VMware itself... Not sure if they were still available, but surely in the greyzone.

@blubberfish does the vm work pretty well, i once had a vm for an older mac os, but it was always glitchy and crashed often so i deleted the vm out of frustration

@jester5537 Never had any problems, much faster than the mini, if you give enough memory/cpu. The only problem is, that you cannot do major upgrades. Now and then I have to setup a fresh one, but pretty easy, just need the shitty xCode.

Just duckduckgo'ed... Also found the newest catalina as ready to go image

Why can Apple shit only be built on Apple?
They say: if you build for our lovely, genius ecosystem, you should also use it yourself.
All other can be built cross platform, even Microsoft got it with .net core...

@blubberfish
I don't disagree, it's vendor lock in. Apple has always been big about building a walled garden.

That said, Microsoft hasn't been any better historically and I have a lot of concern about the current direction; as much as I love .net core, it seems like the ".Net 5" initiative is an old guard attempt to induce enterprise entropy and latency back into the whole ecosystem. The tell for this will be if core team members start leaving. If Sanderson takes over, it's going all the way back to ballmer-era windows-first failboating and I will convert all of our code to spring boot the next week.

@SortOfTested never informed myself as deeply as you. One problem with Microsoft is left, the whole gui thing isn't working on linux.

Don't build for ios devices