Buying an Apple Computer

The moment I had received my activation code for the Apple developer program I was keen to get my Apple computer set up. I used Apple IIe and IIgs machines when I was young, but it had been quite a while since I'd used Apples in my adult life. I was both enthused about having an Apple system in the house and balking at the VERY high prices.

We did serious research into the cheap Mac "cube" systems. This was relatively cheap - about $700 for the cube (no monitor or keyboard) but it also was incredibly inefficient. What if I wanted to code in the living room? Out on a trip? We talked to family and friends about the different Mac options.

In the end we decided on the Mac Pro laptop with its solid aluminum chassis. This was sturdy for taking on the road and standing up to travel abuse. It had a built in camera for Skyping. It had a firewire port, for doing music work. We got it with 4 gig of RAM so it could handle the app development. I got the 13" screen for easy transportation - and since the iPhone screen is fairly small, it's been perfect for development too!

The deal at the Apple store gave us a free printer with it, so that's always a good thing.

On the down side, the first rep we met at an Apple store was very pushy. They had an awful printer at that store but he said it's all Apple offered and going to another store wouldn't help us at all. So we got the system from him. As luck had it, later that day we drove by a different store. They had our perfect printer! So we cashed out the first order and created the order at the new store with the printer we wanted. The lesson here is to shop around.

Also we got $100 off by being enrolled in college (I'm finally finishing up my bachelor's degree, and my son is in college too). So if you're enrolled in a college, be sure to take advantage of that.

So we now had a development machine to create our iPhone applications on!

I have to admit that I am really LOVING my Mac laptop. I especially love the quick finger movements on the touch pad to move between applications, jump to the bottom of a screen, and more. It didn't take any "learning curve" at all.

Buy a Mac Laptop from Amazon.com

Creating an iPhone App


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