WWDC Forced Me To Upgrade. Surprise Consequences of the iOS AI Revolution

A Rushed Purchase

The new Macbook Air

I’m an iOS Developer, and it may or may not be a surprise to you that I enjoy coding!

When Apple announce the new features for Swift, Xcode and the rest of it I’m excited! This year was no exception, with the main excitement coming in the form of AI enhancements.

This isn’t the type of fun I’d have at work with my locked-down machine, so I fired up my personal MacBook Pro and got ready to go!

My Legacy Machine

First I needed to install the latest Mac OS. No problem, I set up a dual-boot partition.

I needed to download the Beta version of Xcode. No problem.

Then…Where is the code completion?

I was meant to see the following, but the Predictive Code Completion Model was missing entirely. What was going on?

The dialogue I didn’t see,

What could be going on? I can’t blame my Touchbar for now allowing this new feature.

It turns out there is a problem with the machine. A big problem indeed.

My machine!

You see my collegues were shocked last year when I bought this machine to replace my Intel version with the M2 Apple silicon version. They asked why I’d stick with the old model and Touchbar. Truth be told, I don’t mind it too much.

They asked how I’d survive with 8GB RAM. Well, for the odd personal project this wouldn’t matter too much.

Only NOW have those chickens come home to roost. The AI features of Xcode require 16GB of RAM minimum.

My Decision

I really want to use AI code completion to try it out and see what can be done. I really believe AI is the future of development and being left behind is a big mistake.