iMac or MacBook Pro for coding?? Spec me...

D.P. · 25 Nov 2011 at 09:48

Starting a new job soon and been told to choose my hardware. I've been advised to use Apple hardware since some of the time I will be developing on an iPhone, but mostly for some severs, android phones, Amazon cloud etc. Pitty I hate MacOS and the fact that Apple does not make a good cross platform iPhone SDK just adds to my dislike of Apple. I will likely install Ubuntu for my primary development work and switch to MacOS when I have to.

That aside what apple hardware would you use for developing? I have a $3K budget (to be purchased in the US where I will work). If I buy a MacBook pro I can add a screen within budget. My worry is that from the experience of friends and collegues the MacBooks are really not reliable with quite a lot of hardware failures, and MacOS tends to crash a lot. I know many will argue this point but from seeing 25 or so collegues with Macs and 50 or so with Thinkpads, the Thinkspads with linux are far more reliable (much more problem with the Macs despite being far fewer!).
What I dislike about the Macbooks is the horrible glossy screen that seems standard unless you pay extra.

I wont need to do much travelling so a laptop is not necessary (and I may purchase my own at a later point) so was thnking of a desktop. The Mac Pros look stupidly overpriced so I looked at the iMacs. I have never seen these used for anything outside of a secretaries office, how do they work out for coding? The 27" screen is probably quite nice but I am wondering if having a dual monitor setup is still better for coding or does the size and resolution take care of this? Do these also have the horrible shinny screen? How easy is it to upgrade an iMac, like replace the CPU or swap the hard disc for a solid state drive?

Do solid state drives make a big difference to coding work? Am I better off simply choosing more memory/faster CPU?

D.P. · 25 Nov 2011 at 10:18

TBH Im thinking of the IMac since I wont travel much, you get more bang for buck, the IPS screen is nicer. The Macbooks are not really very portable, very heavy with all the aluminium, nicer lighter 14" laptops ut there I think or as you said, a macbook air.

D.P. · 25 Nov 2011 at 11:38

Well basically every Mabook pro had to get a new battery with most of their batteries swelling up, 1 even nearly burnt down the lab. All of them seem to suffer from overheating problems and are very hot with fans quite load (we do CPU intensive tasks). 1 screen totally stopped working, another had wonky colours like a connector was loose, another had strange lines appearing over the screen but that was probably a GPU problem. Another had the sound fail, another had a button on the keyboard stick, another had a HD failure. They all tend to destroy a certain brand of ICDs we use, something strange on the USB ports and providing current spikes. We had a Mac pro server with 4 GPUs, all GPU overheated had were replac ed 3 times, we then got rid of the useless thing.

MacOS just seems to crash far more often than Windows XP, Win7 or any linux version. In our office space there was 12-13 of us, about 1/3rd used MacOS. We kept track of fatal OS crashes over an 18 month period and around 70% of all crashes came from the 30% of MacOS computers. Kernel panicks seem quite common. My girlfriend's Mac crashes 2 or 3 times a week, which is an improvement on her earlier one which she exchanged which crashed 2 or 3 times a day. Luckily she didn't pay for it but now she is stuck with an unstable computer.

Some of the thinkpads had batteries swapped on recall but none of them swelled up or caused problems. There was 1 HD failure. Someone dropped 1 and the heatsink dislodged a little so it ran hot but still functioned. 1 Screen had ocasioanl problems, 1 had a noisy fan which we cleaned the dog hair out of and was fine. And that is about all the hardware issue they ever had as far as I recall, and there were far more thinkpads than macs.

D.P. · 25 Nov 2011 at 12:05

Tripnologist said:
btw, SSD makes little to no difference to actual coding, but is very nice to have. I have one and wouldn't go back, although I wouldn't skimp on RAM or CPU to get one.

I think going to 8GB memory is a must, but 16GB is overkill/very expensive (seems liek the iMacs have 4x memory slots so i should be able to upgrade in the future I guess).

The 3.4GHz i7 is $200 more than the 3.1GHz i5, so I guess this is a worthwhile upgrade to get 8 threads and will improve directly compilation time due to cpock speed aloe, let alone multithreading.

Changing the 1Tb HD to a 1TB + 256GB SSD costs $600, worth it?

D.P. · 25 Nov 2011 at 13:34

Tripnologist said:
Ouch, not at that price. A 60 or 120/128GB drive may be a bit more affordable. The idea is to only put the OS and most used programs on it anyway.

Apple profitteering going on I guess. There is no 128GB option for the iMac. I guess I could buy one aftermarket but can't be bothered with that at this stage.

D.P. · 25 Nov 2011 at 17:09

Just sent in my order to the company sicne their is an Apple sale in the US.
27"iMac,3.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM, 1TB Serial ATA Drive + 256GB Solid State Drive. The rest is standard.

I made sure the person buying the hardware knows the upgrades are optional but the memory and CPU upgrade would be especially useful.

D.P. · 5 Jan 2012 at 03:16

Quick update, used the new iMac for 2 days now. Most things worked nicely out of the box, very impressed with the ease if setting up most things like email/printers etc.

But it only took 3 hours to crash the first day, 5 hours the second day (requiring a cold boot) and I was only only doing basic tasks with apple software at these points.

Also hit the first snag with some dependency of the software i will be developing with needing a version of gcc not properly suppeorted by mac sox yet, and it seems the solution is to simply install ubtunu... Unless someone knows how to compile with cmake using gnu++0x extensions in Mac osx Which seems to need gcc 4.3 or later, while gcc 4.2 is the latest for the mac

So mixed feelings

D.P. · 5 Jan 2012 at 16:17

DanF said:
what are you doing to it to make it crash? I've never heard of anyone having issues like this on os x :s My MBP hasn't been rebooted for about 2 months now, I've never had a PC this reliable.

The first time I was checking email, one with an attached PDF. The second time I was playing photo booth or iPhoto etc. nothing taxing.

D.P. · 5 Jan 2012 at 16:19

shine said:
Assuming you're on Lion, use this to install gcc.

Thanks for the link, will check it out a little later, should be a big help

D.P. · 5 Jan 2012 at 16:21

fez said:
If you are just doing normal tasks and its crashing then its probably a hardware fault. I haven't rebooted my mac in months and its used all day everyday for intensive work and it hasn't had a single issue.

While I would like to believe that, from the experience of friends and colleges that doesn't seem true. My girlfriend's MacBook crashed daily, turned out to be a VPN issue, now it crashes only weekly or less with a different VPN client