What's a good machine for iPhone development? [closed]

Question

I'm going to be working on some iPhone apps so I've been given a golden ticket to buy a Mac. However the golden ticket isn't worth that much, and I'm thinking iMac. Now, Macs are great, I love 'em and use 'em at home, but I know that the iMac is geared more towards the average consumer than the professional. Is an iMac going to be powerful enough to do iPhone development on?

If it helps any, the only thing I envision doing on the Mac is running XCode and maybe a web browser.

Is there anybody out there doing iPhone development and having trouble running the required tools on their machine? If so, what do you have?

Answer 1

Any modern Mac will be fine. I work on a two year old MacBook (2GHz) with 2Gb of memory and its perfectly usable. The biggest constraint I find it screen real-estate. I am way more productive on my 22" external screen. Go big if you get an iMac or consider adding an external monitor to the base model.

Answer 2

The iMac is a very fast machine and will be more than suitable for iPhone development. In most cases, a Mac Mini with maxed out ram is good enough.

Keep in mind that out of the box, the Mac Mini can only accommodate one monitor.