what is the optimal hardware to use for iphone app building?

Question

I have never programmed on a mac; i did program on a NeXT machine using objective-c tho. I want to learn to develop iphone apps what is the recommended optimal (read lowest cost versus best developer experience) hardware to buy from Apple for iphone development?

thank you in advance.

Answer 1

From Craig Hockenberry:

Buy a Mac

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There’s no two ways about it. If you’re going to develop iPhone applications, you’re going to do it on a Mac. The whole toolchain is Mac-only: you can’t do it in Visual Studio or Eclipse or anything else that runs on Windows.

Don’t think that this is some evil plan by Apple to make you use a Mac. It’s no more nefarious than Microsoft requiring Mac developers to purchase Visual Studio in order to develop Windows versions of our products.

Buying a Mac can be an expensive proposition: if you’re just getting started and on a shoestring budget, here’s some advice on doing it on the cheap:

1. Buy a used machine. A lot of perfectly good hardware can be found on Ebay. New models of the Mac Book Pro were recently introduced, so many people are selling hardware after they upgrade. This older hardware is perfectly fine for doing iPhone development: the apps you’re going to develop are small and compact and don’t need a lot of processor power to build and test.
2. Buy a Mac mini. Even though you’re buying new hardware, you’ll save money because you’re supplying your own display, keyboard and other peripherals. If you’re like me, you have plenty of this stuff lying around.

If you’re having a hard time justifying the hardware expenditure, remember that you can run Windows or any other x86 based OS on this machine.

The only thing to keep in mind as you’re buying hardware: make sure that the Mac has an Intel processor. The development tools won’t run on the older PowerPC processors.

As others have said, a powerful machine is of little benefit for iPhone development: compiling is fast enough on the slowest mini and you're not going to be writing huge programs for such constrained (compared to desktop) hardware; the simulator does not do processor emulation so it will always be way faster on whatever Intel Mac hardware than a real live iPhone, etc. So buy a more expensive Mac only if you have some other use for it that would justify the expense.

Update: as of 2013, if you are buying hardware make sure you buy something that supports Mountain Lion, as the iOS development tools generally require the latest Mac OS X release, or at best its predecessor.

Answer 2

All you need is something powerful enough to run XCode and the iPhone simulator without getting bogged down. Get yourself the new Mac mini with 2GB of memory and that should be more than enough - that's probably the cheapest way to do it.