Anybody know what's the cheapest setup you could get away with for iOS/xcode development? Would it be a (used) Macbook Air, or can you not really run xcode effectively on them?
I remember being broke out of college and setting one up out of necessity. It's still going! I'm typing on it now. It needs a motherboard/processor upgrade, _maybe_, these days. Still one of the best cost-saving decisions I've made in my life. And it just plain feels good to not have to throw out / recycle a laptop every five years. They're terrible for the environment.
There are shops that will build the hardware for you. Setting up the bootloader is still the hardest part, but it gets easier with each iteration of the Hackintosh software ecosystem.
The only "issue" it has is the low res (I drive an external monitor for higher resolutions) and the plastic under the back of the screen being cracked in one place. Other than that, just like new.
An old MacBook Pro will work fine, as long as it has an SSD and some sensible quantity of RAM.
No need to buy new.
I recently started dabbling in video editing a bit and that's what definitely gets the fans going.