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Learning iOS development on @MacinCloud

I have been wanting to learn and develop iOS apps or a while. The price of a good developer's Mac was a little unreasonably high and I am quite sure I am not ready to switch over 100% to a Mac anytime soon. I found MacinCloud.com and their pricing is very reasonable. I didn't want to own a Mac, I didn't want to spend a lot of cash, but I wanted to use a Mac for a few hours a day just to learn iOS development. MacinCloud.com just worked out fine.

I signed up for the $20 per month service to access a real Mac (not a Virtual Machine) for three hours a day. The device they gave me is a high end Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM and preloaded with all the popular app development tools and platforms out there, including XCode, PhoneGap and a lot of others that I am not even familiar with. Google drive and Dropbox are already installed and so is Chrome and Firefox. Save all your data in Google Drive or Dropbox, share with your team or move your content to your personal laptop. Too many options, but there is no admin access. I was fine with that because they had everything I needed pre-installed and ready to go.

I have options to login through Remote Desktop or login via browser. I didn't even try the browser option. There are other options for accessing from a iOS device, but c'mon why would anyone want to do that?

The customer service is great too. I was having issues with performance at night time. I sent an email to them, they responded by next day morning, asked me to run some speed tests and traceroutes. The next day, they moved me to a different server and it has been working great since then.

Brand new Mac Mini with 2.6GHz processor and 16B of RAM: $899

Yearly cost of the same device on MacinCloud: 20 x 12 = $240

It is a better deal than owning a Mac for what I want to do with it. I think I will stick with MacinCloud.com for now.
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