Getting my first Mac, please help

Hi there,

I'm developing for a couple of years now in Unity on Windows and I'm looking to buy a Mac for both iOS development and Mac OS development in Unity. I would have asked this on a Mac forum, but since is Unity game dev specific I'm posting it here.

I was planning to get a Mac Mini with Radeon on it, but the new Mac models have been announced and the new Mac Mini has only Intel HD 4000 (which sucks).

So my options are:

1. A new iMac from the latest generation (21.5" one), which is pretty expensive but has good specs, including a nVidia 640/650 M, 8 GB of Ram, i5 quad core

2. A used (second hand) MacBook Pro which I can find at about 900-1000$ on ebay (or please suggest other stores, in Europe if possible).

Which one is better, providing that portability is not important for me in this case, either laptop or desktop I'll still keep it on a desk and work with it?

(or if you have a 3rd, I would love to hear it).

Thanks

 

As a user of MacBook Pro and as a person who suffers from tinnitus, I personally don't like the sound of the fans (it makes tinnitus worse for me). They spin up over 2k immediatly after you even think about GPU or consuming more than 5% of CPU, and running Unity keeps them busy all the time. If the humming is no problem, then I guess the laptop is fine too. But if you don't need the portability, I'd go with the iMac-route. For serious laptop-work, an external monitor/keyboard/mouse is almost a must have. The screen is a bit too small, your hands sweat because of the heat of the machine etc. It's not impossible, but for longer perioids laptop by itself for Unity-development is a bit difficult.

You'll get better specs for lower price on the iMac anyway. For me, I need laptop all the time, so for now on it's my main computer, but because of recently getting more involved with Unity3D, I'm beginning to want an iMac or even Mac Pro. Just to get rid of the freaking noise it makes.

 

Unless you plan on high-end gaming with the Mac mini, the graphics card isn't really much of a concern. The HD 4000 is more than good enough for development.

--Eric

 

I have a very good PC for gaming, so Mac would be used only for development, but still developing for Mac desktop I want to use a few special effects possible with Unity that are not usually used on iOS. I am not very familiar with the HD 4000 chip, but I do own an i3 380M based laptop which has some Intel Graphics on chip and it is a pain to work on, and in the past I owned an Intel Core 2 Duo with some 945G graphics chip that was also very bad. How good is the 4000 compared to those?

 

The HD 4000 is only a little worse than the Radeon 6630M from the previous model, but the newer models have better CPU options.

--Eric

 

Ok, thanks a lot for your advice. I have about 15 more days to think about it before having to actually buy it,still a tough decision

 

8GB RAM is the minimum I recommend (I had Unity crash with 4GB).

 

Only if you have a really really huge project, though I suspect something else was the cause of the crash. Otherwise 2GB is acceptable (though more is obviously better, and you can't buy any current models with less than 4GB anyway). I've had 6GB for some time and it's more than enough for Unity. Remember that Unity is still 32-bit, and cannot make use of more than 4GB on OS X anyway, or ~3GB on Windows, so 8GB is pretty much irrelevant until such time as they make a 64-bit editor.

--Eric

 

I recently started working on a new Mac Mini (Dedicated graphics, 4GB RAM) and haven't run into any problems yet. For making iPhone games, it's just fine.

 

I use iMac and Macbook Pro - they're equally up to the task. (I have 8 gig ram in both - ram is cheap). But note that I'm usually also running CS6 Illustrator and other programs at the same time

However, if you want an iMac best wait until end of year (? not sure of date?) when the new iMac comes out. Worth the wait.

 

hi,

Let me share my experience, currently own 3x2011 mac mini. And they are great workhorse for ios/mac development.
Firstly, easy upgrade of RAMs and HDD
Secondly, many good 3rd party 27" or 30" screens to choose from. e.g, Dell or HP.
Finally, they are the cheapest mac around....

The cons, the fans will spin-up once you you hit the C/GPU intensive stuffs in unity3d. (guess all machine will do that unless the temperature sensor is faulty!). Recently, one of the mini refused to spin-down and drove me crazy for a month, until i got the "3rd" mini and sent it for a board replacement ;-)

Br,
Peter

 

I understand that the smaller model (the one which I'm considering) will be launched sometime in November.

 

Last saturday I've got the new 2012 Mac mini with i7 as a newer machine to work in Unity (I have an old 2008 15'' MacBook Pro). It's just awesome, the i7 is really fast and the HD4000 surprised me.
It's small, has plenty of power and lots of ports (FW800, I need it!), it's silent and extremely energy efficient. And it's light, so it's easy to carry around if you need it.
Only the 5400rpm hard disk is dog slow, but easy to replace.
Just ordered 16gb of RAM and a 120gb SSD as a boot drive.

Mac mini i7 + 16GB + 120SSD 6G = around 1000$.

Lots of bang for the bucks, and a really good machine to work in Unity/Xcode.