I'm looking to get some kinda Mac development going on, now would a mini mac do the job good enough? Has anyone gone down this route and found any problems?
I have never used a Mac before but I dont think I can resist its lure.
I use a Mac Mini - 2Ghz Core2, 120GB HDD, DVD-writer.
Works great :-)
You might consider upgrading the RAM from the standard 1 gig though.
I've got 4 in mine (it can address about 3.3 of that), but Apple will only factory-fit up to 2 gig.
It only cost me £60 for the 4, although I had to fit it myself, which was a bit of an adventure. Interestingly, I enquired from the shop (in Pretoria, RSA) where I bought the Mini, and they wanted to charge me £300 to install 2gig.. I politely declined.
It doesn't come with mouse or keyboard, so you'll need those (both USB).
Runs my 24" 1900x1200 Samsung screen fine.
I'm also using it as my home wireless file/print server, which it handles admirably, all the while doing my dev work.
The only issues you may find are a lack of support for OpenGL features, since the gfx chip is only an Intel 950.
But as a very-small-form-factor dev box, I can't fault it :-)
If they updated the gfx to a 3100, I'd probably get another one.
The Mac Mini shares it's system ram with the graphics card so it is like programming on a low end laptop when it comes to anything graphically intensive. I'd recommend an iMac if you can stretch that far, the Mini is cheap for a reason. Then again if you're just getting it for porting code across or not planning anything too heavily 3D it shouldnt be a problem.
I do all my Unity stuff on a my mac mini (1.2 ghz 20gb hdd). It does better than one of my 2.4ghz laptops TBH.
I recommend an iMac, the latest batch have pretty decent graphics cards and good performance in general, and they start at a 20" size now. About $1100 to $1200. I got mine a while ago when they were all-white without the fancy gloss screens n'all, but I did save about $100 by buying a refurbished model from Apple directly - ie it's one that was sold and sent back due to some fault, then fixed by Apple and cleaned and tested thoroughly, so `good as new` really. I haven't had any problems with it.
I'd hold off for the next revisions. The new notebooks, for example, are imminent.