> - Needs a quadcore Xeon with at least 16 GB and SSD to have an usable experience with Android Studio, or configure it to run in laptop mode

I'd disagree with the Xeon bit, I have a 6 year old Sandy Bridge quad core, and Android Studio runs butter smooth.

I'll confess to the 16GB of RAM and an SSD though. Although honestly an SSD now days is required for anything to be usable.

Android Studio is amazingly performant though, the Emulator is great, ignoring bugs and glitches and the occasional times it just stops working until I flip enough settings back and forth that it starts working again.

Of course a huge benefit is that I don't need Apple hardware to develop for Android.

The main issue I have seen is that people don't know how to configure Android Studio & Gradle memory consumption.

Granted, they should not have to do that in the first place but once done correctly, it makes AS fly even on very large projects.

I also rather develop for Android, but Android Studio resource requirements made me appreciate Eclipse again.

Apparently AS 3.0 will be better on that regard.

> I also rather develop for Android, but Android Studio resource requirements made me appreciate Eclipse again.

There is a reason my dev machine is a Desktop. Better keyboard, better monitor, better performance. 6 year old machine, cost about $1500, performs better than the ultraportables a lot of people try to press into service for writing code. Even with a faster CPU, thermal throttling is a concern once the form factor gets to a certain size.

We don't get to chose what we get.

Usually the customer's IT assigns hardware to external consultants.

Ah interesting, when my team used external consultants, we did the inverse, we gave the consulting company a beefy requirements list and told them anyone sent to work for us must be at least that well equipped.

Paying by the hour, we were heavily motivated to minimize compile times. :)

>Needs a quadcore Xeon with at least 16 GB and SSD to have an usable experience with Android Studio, or configure it to run in laptop mode

I've had no problems using Android Studio on my Mac with 8GB. On a side note, the Android emulator even started faster than the iOS simulator. I also found it odd that the Android Emulator seemed to consume less resources than the iOS simulator which was taking up about 2GB of RAM.

Thanks, it's a one-time payment so I completely forgot about Android's developer account fee. And I'll add the other points too.

Edit: Also, how does Xcode compare in performance? It seems lighter, but I only have a pretty recent Macbook Pro to test on (which also handles Android Studio just fine)

> Also, how does Xcode compare in performance? It seems lighter, but I only have a pretty recent Macbook Pro to test on (which also handles Android Studio just fine)

Depends on what you open with it - for ObjC it's usually faster and smoother, for Swift it tends to be slower (about on par with AS Kotlin plugin) and for C++/ObjC++ it's horribly slow just like any other IDE out there :/

Much lighter, the iMacs at the office still handle it.