Using a Mac mini for development

The much talked about – latest version of Mac Mini is out! With it rises the question once again, is a Mac Mini powerful enough to be used for application development purposes?

The official Mac Mini page flaunts the technical specifications of the product proudly. With fully loaded features (mentioned below), Mac Mini is quite the bang for the buck.

2.4GHz or 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
3MB on-chip shared L2 cache
1066MHz frontside bus
2GB (two 1GB SO-DIMMs) of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM; two SO-DIMM slots support up to 8GB

I believe the current Mac Mini is powerful enough for development of iPhone apps. I did some research on Google to see what people around the world feel about mac mini application development and the answers i found are pretty much straightforward.

“I’ve been using the Mini myself for web and game development and I couldn’t be happier.”
“Mac Mini is a good cost-effective option for development purposes, especially during financial crunch. Our company bought mac minis to develop iPhone apps. ”
“A quick test shows that the new Mac mini is nearly 6 times faster at compiling and linbestking a Universal binary of PerfectTablePlan from scratch”
“I have been using a Mac mini to port my C++/Qt based code to Mac OS X for the last 3.5 years.”

Not all answers were this positive. Some also opined that :

“I’m using one for iPhone development – it’s my first mac. I run it headless and connect to it using logmein.com . Wish I had sprung for the 2GB of memory; 1GB gets bogged down when I have xcode + a dozen Safari tabs open.”

However, one thing was for certain. Hit across a couple of software companies in India too which are experts in Mac OSX development and it took me a couple of more google searches to find out that Mac Minis are the best for iphone app development when you have a constrained budget or you dont want to incur large costs getting a Mac.

Some of the India based offshore companies who specialize in iPhone and iPad Development services for Small and Medium Enterprises as well as Fortune companies, have perfected the ability to work efficiently on Mac to reduce the development costs.

Mindfire Solutions has been working in this area for about 8 years now. Their team of iPhone developers with their wide experience in iPhone application development and iPad application development has created a strong track record in the latest phone platform – Apple’s iPhone. Mindfire’s iPhone experts have very good knowledge-rich experience in iPhone application development, and their deep expertise comes as much from experience as from passion. Mindfire is acknowledged as the 4th Best iPhone Application Development Company by Best Web Design Agencies.com, an independent rating agency which ranks service providers periodically. Similarly there are other software companies in India which offer iPhone services on a Mac Mini.

What do you feel? Will the Mac Mini be a successful platform for building iPhone apps given the robustness which is being built into it with the latest version? Will the Mac Mini be a welcome choice for the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) and would see an inrush into Mac application development?

For more details on Mac Mini application development and how it can benefit you, please feel free to contact us at info@mindfiresolutions.com or visit our website to view our Mac Carbon and Cocoa Mac Osx Skills, Classic Mac Skills and projects.

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