The best MacBook in terms of price-performance ratio for a beginner in Xcode

If you're going to be running Xcode, you probably want a decent amount of RAM, and storage. Extra CPU cores might be nice, too, for compiling very large projects, but you need the basics, first.

For $2000, you can get a 14" MacBook Pro with

• A plain M5 chip (10-core CPU, 10-core GPU)
• 24 GB of RAM
• 1 TB of internal SSD storage

Jumping up to 32 GB of RAM (if you did that) would add another $200.

You could also check Apple's Certified Refurbished store. I doubt if they have any 14" M5 MacBook Pros in there, but they might have some 14" M4 Pro MacBook Pros that would be of interest. (Typically the price on a Certified Refurbished Mac is about 15% off original new list price.)

Note that if your M2 MacBook Air has enough RAM for what you are doing now – and is simply running out of SSD space – you could look at offloading stuff onto external SSDs. (Or even installing macOS and Xcode onto a larger external SSD and booting off that SSD – my understanding is that Xcode needs to live on the startup drive.)

There are some external SSDs that are very small (small enough to slip into the pocket of a laptop computer bag), but that hold 2 TB, 4 TB, or (if you have lots of $$$) even 8 TB.

while I do not work with Xcode, I do embedded processor development for STMicro STM32 series of chips which has lots of driver library code, with various RTOS (real time operating systems) with lots of files, in top of my actually developed source code. I use this with an IDE based on Visual Studio Code with extensions.

I do all this on a M4 MacBook Air 13" with 24GB RAM and a 512GB SSD and external 4K display with quite high performance. While it would not be as fast as a MacBook Pro with a Pro or Max chip, the builds are quite fast.

BTW, I will usually also have PDF docs and Safari open for reference information at the same time.

It gets warm for a bit but quickly cools down. During a clean and rebuild cycle I generally see CPU temps get to 75-80C in a 20-22C room. Incremental builds put much less strain on the CPU. Normally on my M4 MBA, it runs at about 15-20C above ambient temp. The CPU actually doesn't get all that hot because most of the time it is shuffling source files and object files on and off the SSD.

I generally see somewhat higher temp spikes when I process RAW files from my DSLR because it is a much more CPU/GPU intensive process.

The only situation I would see a possible temperature issue would be when rendering say 4K video files that would take 5-10 minutes or more. Even then, the processor will throttle the speed to cool things down to a reasonable temp.

So, I would say the bottom line is unless you are developing the next MS office alternative, Adobe Photoshop alternative, or some super game (actually the game app itself would likely make the machine run hotter than the build), etc. you will likely not have any concern with temp issues.