How good does xcode run on a 13 inch Macbook Air 2013?

All current Macs run Xcode just fine.

In the end tho, the questions may be: can you work on a small screen; is an SSD size-constrained for your work; does that work require more physical ram than a portable can support?

If you can outline your app goals - Mac or iOS or both or ? - and what your app's content might require - image authoring/editing; audio authoring/editing; video authoring/editing; database editing/warehousing/serving, you can then better ask the real questions that pertain to you. Remember, other applications may be open at the same time, such as a browser, text editor, etc., etc. You should also provide for a tested and reliable backup.

Also, don't be shy about visiting the nearest Apple Store for hands on. And finally, see the 'More Like This' links on the right.

Good luck in any case.

I do everything on a 13" machine. However, I recently bought a cheap, but very nice, 20" HP monitor of $100.

Standard MacBook Air builds do not run XCode well at all. If you are going with a MacBook Air you need to upgrade the processor and memory at minimum. If you are only using it for dev, it won't matter which ssd you go with. I attempted running a typical (not very complex) project on the 13" 1.3 ghz i5, 256gb ssd, 4gb RAM model (highest end you can get in stores) and couldn't even scroll through code. It compiled everything fine, and the simulator worked with no issues, but even with only Xcode running it was far too taxing on the system. From the benchmarks I have seen, I would assume a MacBook Air with the 1.7 ghz processor and 8gb RAM would run XCode fine, but at that cost, you might as well get a MacBook Pro.

I don't have an Air to test with, but I'm quite skeptical about your report. Apple's official requirements are only an Intel Mac. Pretty much all of us at some point ran Xcode on machines in the Mhz range. I don't see why scrolling would be impossible when you can do everything else. Perhaps you are running some other appliation that has exhausted your video RAM. I suggest taking your machine to an Apple Store and comparing performance with another Air.

The only other application running was the activity monitor, I absolutley made sure of that. Mavericks alone takes up around 2.5-3gb of ram while idle. I got the Air, tried XCode right away, and when I saw it couldnt run it I took it back. If you're skeptical, I'll send you a project and you are welcome to go to the Apple store and see for yourself. You might be able to get away with the most basic of projects, but nothing else. I'm offering my advice based on real, actual hands on experience, not conjecture.

To clarify on what I meant when I said I couldnt even scroll through the code, I would scroll, then about 10 seconds later XCode would catch up and jump to the section that was scrolled to. This tells me that either the 1.3 ghz processor was incapable of keeping up with processes queued, or the memory was too overloaded to queue up the new processes. Im leaning more towards the processor since I was able to run the exact same project on an older Macbook Pro with only 4gb of RAM as well.

You are indirectly correct about the requirements - for XCode 5 (which is the version I was running) you are required to have OSX 10.8.4 or later. There are, however, no official hardware requirements. You could only infer hardware requirements from the hardware requirements of OSX 10.8 (2 GB of RAM, 8 GB of available storage). In any case, just because your system meets the minimum requirements, its not necessarily going to be capable of properly running a program as taxing as XCode.

sd11089 wrote:

The only other application running was the activity monitor

There can be a lot more running than just Applications. It could be a problem with the new "Show Live issues" in Xcode. Modern Xcode is pretty much always compiling and you might notice that when you are editing. That may put pressure on an Air with limited memory and only two cores. You may be able to just turn off Live issues and get more traditional IDE behaviour. But I guess it is a moot point if you took the machine back.