I’m looking on picking up a Mac to take advantage of my newly acquired iOS license. What is the best machine to use? I already have a device to test on, so I just need the Mac. Apple’s $100 fee is no problem.
Was thinking of a MacBook (not Pro, regular). What are your guys’ thoughts? Not made of money…
If you can afford an iMac that’s by far the best option. Buying a lower end powerbook isn’t the greatest price/performance ratio and minis have horrible gfx cards.
Not sure what you mean by regular MacBook. The only other MacBooks are Airs. While they have plenty of power for Unity, the 11 inch screen is a bit small. Aside from that, any of the Macs you can buy will work wonderfully!
There used to be the MacBook (you know, the white one). Apple decided to get rid of it.
Nope, the Mac Pro is. 
Particularly since Powerbooks are very old and can’t run Unity.
The more recent models are OK.
–Eric
I would not get the macbook.
I do want to mention that after the unity 3.5 update my 64mb gfx card POS macbook started running unity. (would not run 3.4) It will only handle super simple projects but I do use it sometimes with only a few issues that can be worked around.
iMac is best. $1199 for Quad Core, 512 Graphics, 4gb ram($150 on newegg for 16gb), so its the best.
As far as cost/power ratio goes, your best bet is definitely an iMac. The Mac Pro hasn’t been updated in two years, leaving it with the pre-Sandy Bridge generation of Xeon CPUs, a really old graphics card, and a disappointing amount of RAM. Just compare:
Even the bottom-end 21.5" iMac is a better buy, sporting better specs than the Mac Pro and only costing $1,199.
Sure, the Mac Pro has more upgradability, but in reality most will have little need to upgrade anything.
Get an iMac
Productivity is much better on an iMac compared to a mac book pro. Will also cost you alot less to get the same power…
But if he doesn’t have room for an iMac, MBP would be best.
I was going to pickup the 13" base macbook pro this week: 2.4ghz i5, with the HD3000. its about $1200. I assume this will work for my iOS development, low poly 3d type stuff. If anyone thinks this will be too weak or frustratingly slow, let me know so I can save myself the trouble and go with the 13" 2.8ghz, or the 15" with the gpu, thanks!
I’m currently developing on a windows laptop with dedicated card, but the machine is a total lemon, crashes 10x a day, plus another dozen or so random reboots (usually before i’ve saved my changes) . I can’t wait to get a machine that will work, work well, and work well for a long time.
The iMac certainly looks sweet, but is it really worth the $1,999 it’ll set me back? I mean, has anyone ever seen any issues with them?
Endgame - The base 13" MacBook would run Unity3d well.
SevenBits - the $1199 iMac would work really well for Unity3d also. You can google around for what people think but, IMHO, they are well engineered machines and it would be perfect for iOS work.
Here is my opinion that apparently is different from others:
If all you want it is for iOS development, and likely just purely build your Android games for iOS, then I say get a Mac Mini. The cheapest of them. It will do the building just fine and its a perfectly workable computer. It also works magnificently with your existing keyboard/mouse/monitor specially if you get a switcher.
Another benefit of the Mac Mini is that it’s the cheapest and slowest performing machine apple sells now. This is a good thing, if you decide to port your game for the Mac App Store later, as you know at least the weakest computer sold today will manage your title by stress testing it on a Mini.
I did this path myself and don’t regret it. Now, the Mac virus bit me and I bought 27" iMac back in December, but am retaining the low end Mac Mini for stress testing.
Well, that’s good news. I’m happy to hear that.
How about desktop builds? Do iMacs have the oomph for those graphics-heavy games, not just Unity stuff? I mean, in case I want to buy some games…
Regarding the engineering, I know how well they’re built. It helps when hardware and software comes from one company, though it certainly increases prices a bit…
If you want the mac for leisure, then an iMac may work well. Check out the performance for the graphic chip here:
http://www.apple.com/imac/performance.html
Hopefully they will also address issues with external thunderbolt video cards and at some point you will be able to use an external chassis to hook up the latest and greatest video card into the thing.
I’d like to say, I have the early 2011 base Macbook Pro 13", and I run everything smooth, I run Skyrim at 27 to 45 fps, I can run anything in Unity, so talking about only running low poly stuff is bull, my old Toshiba laptop from 2004 can run Unity with 50k polygons, and it has a P4, 512 ram and a 64mb ATI card.The MBP would be fine for the next year or two.
This would be for game development and playing. I just want to know what I’m getting into before spending a ton of money I probably don’t have.
Now we see the release of MBP 2012 edition Retina Display …
I’m considering buying this but from what I read so far it’s not very well suited to running applications … Most applications out there aren’t designed to cater to a retina display… not yet anyways.
So maybe I should simply holdout for sometime yet … I’m only just getting into developing for ios so I have loads to learn before uploading to Apple Store.
Then get the non-retina MBP, it’s super-cool also. But you could always run the Retina mac at a lower resolution, if you really need it.