at best you can run OS X Lion. That's it. Before you even get to that, though, you have to upgrade to Snow Leopard for silly arbitrary reasons.
OS X is currently on Mountain Lion, going to Mavericks real soon now. I would not count on Xcode running on Lion for any real length of time now. After that, you're 100% screwed.
Contrast that to Windows XP, where I can still run the latest iTunes and sync the latest iPhone 5 with. Can't do that in Leopard, either.
OK, so ~6 years later, I get a new laptop. The only reason I haven't already is because the MacBook was a great machine to start with.
I understand the complaint if mobile development is a hobby (then yes, iOS development gets expensive very quickly), but if it's how you make your living then it's literally a rounding error.
Wow, I'm amazed they dropped support for computers that recent. New versions Windows/Linux will still run on very old hardware, there are usually drivers around.
He apparently had the bad luck to own the most recently made model of Macintosh that will not run Mountain Lion; virtually every other Mac from 2008 is OK.
The business case for supporting older computers is very different for Microsoft (or for Linux) than it is for Apple.
OS X is currently on Mountain Lion, going to Mavericks real soon now. I would not count on Xcode running on Lion for any real length of time now. After that, you're 100% screwed.
Contrast that to Windows XP, where I can still run the latest iTunes and sync the latest iPhone 5 with. Can't do that in Leopard, either.