Title: 2011 Mac with flutter development
Tags: ios;macos;flutter;dart;operating-system
Question: I am looking at purchasing a Mac mini to help with development of a flutter application. The newest versions are quite expensive and after looking on ebay the cheaper versions are the 2011 models.
The hardware is primarily 2.3 GHz i5, 8gb ram and SSD which seems fine but the OS version varies from mountain lion to High Sierra. I assume older versions can be updated?
I can't find anywhere that specifies minimum OS versions for flutter. Does anyone know whether a 2011 Mac mini with this spec would be appropriate for app development. I would like to also use the IOS emulator with newer apple device/phone models and iOS versions.
Sorry I have little experience with Mac os. Thanks a lot
(I may also want to try swift coding in xcode)

Here is the accepted answer: Can I update Mac OS to newer version?
What are the minimum requirements for flutter development using Mac machine?
The latest stable version of flutter is v1.12.13+hotfix.8
This version of flutter requires a minimum Xcode version of 11.0.0.  See the screen shot below.
The Xcode 11 requires a Mac running macOS 10.14.3 (macOS Mojave) or later. See more details here.
Xcode 11 includes SDKs for iOS 13, iPadOS 13, watchOS 6, macOS 10.15, tvOS 13 and Swift 5.1. Xcode 11 supports running multiple concurrent versions of the Xcode app and of any associated tools such as Simulator.
You can find more details from here.
Comment for this answer: Thanks a lot for the answer. After some googling it seems the 2011 model cannot update past high Sierra. Do you think I Should I be buying a newer model e.g. 2014?
Comment for this answer: Thanks so much for the help  Could you link me the source for the minimum version of xcode with flutter so I can read more.  Also if I have another question would you mind if I ask you as a comment on this question? I'm scared I'll waste a bunch of money.
Comment for this answer: Yes, apple don't care about backward compatibility. The bottle neck here is xcode 11 can not work on previous versions of Mac OS, and that's so sad!
Comment for this answer: @ebg11 I added more details and screenshot of flutter doctor  result from a mac machine that does not have xcode 11. If you find the info as helpful, feel free to upvote and accept the answer.


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