what apple portable to develop software?

B

bschiett

Registered
hi all,

I'm a developer who comes from a windows background and needs to do some c++ development and has no clue what apple computer to buy. I am limited in budget, I would like to be able to take my computer on the plane in a comfortable position (take a 12" then?), and I will be doing C++ development + users interfaces, usb driver development/host application software and running some real-time sound apps such as MAX/MSP by Cycling74. I was thinking about an iBook, 768MB ram. any suggestions?

thanks,
bert
 
Hey Bert, welcome to the Mac world. Rest assured that whatever Mac portable you get, it will come with all the development software you need from Apple (isn't that great?), including Xcode, etc...
 
I have an iBook, I like it quite a bit. It is extremely portable and has excellent battery life. The only downside to mine was that it was the original G4 iBook that had the 256K L2 cache instead of 512. I don't know if that is why or if it because the hard drive runs at a lower RPM but things always seemed to load faster on an old 400Mhz G4. I haven't used one of the new iBooks but i would assume they are a lot better.

As far as coding goes, I do mostly Java, it runs fairly well on the iBook despite the slow Java performance i have noticed in OS X

PowerBooks are nice too, if you have the money.
 
There are only 2 major reasons to get a 12" Powerbook over an iBook
  1. You think in the future that you'll want to connect to an Apple cinema display
  2. You want to shoot digital movies and burn them to DVD (i.e. the 12" PB has a Superdrive). Even if you don't think you want to do this now, simply owning a Mac often takes you down this route because it's so much fun to do.

Kap

P.S. Point 2 can be overcome with an iBook if you get an external DVD burner later
 
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