Best Apple Mac for mid range and iPhone development?

Unity Engine
1

Hiya guys,

Today I hit a problem - I am developing using a PowerPC G4 running at 1.67 and 512MB.

We wish to develop for mid-range PC/MAC and iPhones.

The iPhone component requires an Intel Mac for the iPhone SDK.

So I need some friendly help and advice please. We want to develop for all platforms and don’t particularly want fence our selves in. Budgets are a concern so I need to find out which Apple Mac is optimum for the kind of development I would like to do.

It may be nice to have a laptop solution so would a mid-range Mac Book be enough? Or do I realy need to go for a desktop?

Any help or thoughts/considerations would be great - thanks in advance.

2

I would recommend taking a look at the latest iMac Systems. They arent too expensive and will serve all your needs, even if you go for performance heavy games. I am currently developing on 3.06 iMac with 4Gigs of RAM and its a real dream machine.
I would not suggest to buy a laptop. Graphic Performance on powerbooks are ok, but their capabilities are limited. Also i would not advice to buy a mac mini unless you only want to use it for coding. The actual iMac is the midrange mac system of today, so you will soon be at the low end when going for anything less…

You may also search the “Gossip” Forum. This topic was discussed in detail not long ago.

3

Tnx,

I have just had a chat with the guys on the IRC and I think we will go for the following:

20 inch
2.66GHz
2GB Memory
320 GB Hard drive
ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256MB Ram

Price is £807.66 plus VAT

That should get us up and running.

What does everyone else think?

4

If you can afford that, go for it, but I just want to say this. If you are developing for the iPhone… graphics performance really doesn’t matter.

You aren’t going to be pushing any limits with iPhone games on the lowest of low-end Intel MacBooks.

Of course, it’s nice to have something that is more versatile if you want to do other things.

Using Apple’s iPhone simulator (w/out Unity) is also pretty slow on earlier MacBooks.

5

Hi pete i use a intel mac core duo works fine i picked mine up on ebay for four hundred Big ones. works sweet for development

6

Thats great info. thanks for you help with this.

We’ve settled on a 2GB, 20" 2.66 Ghz core duo. Looks brilliant for most things.

IPete2.