iMac or Mac Mini for Web Development?

The mini with an appropriately large screen would suffice, I think. It comes down to what else you want to do with the machine. If you intend to game as well, get the iMac.

Yeah, you should be fine with the Mini if that's the route you choose to go. I use a much slower machine now for web dev, design, and photoshop work and don't have any issues unless I get into high res print work.

Just load it up with RAM and go with the SSD (or add one) if possible and you'll have a snappy little machine.

The iMac is a better machine. Price them both out after the updates are announced tomorrow.

I am in the same boat. My plan is simple yet cunning:

IF iMac = matte option or less glare revised screen

THEN iMac

IF ELSE

Mac Mini with 3rd party matte screen

Lol!

I will go with....

The iMac, because:

1- In the 27 inch version you have plenty of screen to work
2-Better graphics
3-Better storage options
4-Slightly better processor

If so, I will modify the iMac with more RAM (max out) or maybe a SSD

Having say the above, if you have a nice screen, good keyboard and mouse, maybe the mini is the way to go, with modifications:

-SSD
-Max out the RAM
-External Firewire storage

Mooey said:

Now that both the Mac Mini and iMac have been announced, can anyone give me an opinion on what they would do if they were in my position?

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I'm in a similar boat and it's honestly a coin flip, probably less so if you already have a really nice display. Both will be more than adequate, I'm going to check out the benchmarks when everything is released and then decide.

iMac. No question.

Mooey said:

Now that both the Mac Mini and iMac have been announced, can anyone give me an opinion on what they would do if they were in my position?

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I'd go with the iMac.

Keep in mind that the only program that is really going to tax your system, that you mentioned, is Photoshop. The base model with 8GB of RAM will easily suit your needs, and no doubt serve you well for the next few years without ever requiring an upgrade.

Both have sufficient resources (memory, wifi, ethernet, disk storage) to do what you do since you noted you have the peripherals and monitors. One is obviously much more portable if that matters to you, so maybe you need to figure out of being able to toss it in your soft case and connect remotely from home (if you have monitor, peripherals there as well) or you don't care and always work in your office.

I personally might consider the retina capable MacBook Pro 13" or 15" as I get complete portability and remote connectivity along with ability to dual monitor at work or home. Especially if you travel or do presentations.

Go with the Mini. The iMac is a total new design that is going to have a false start with production problems. With the mini, you're set. Attach it to a Dell 2711 or the new 27 inch samsung PLS displays, and you have a great matte 2560x1440 display that in the Dell case also allows AdobeRGB/sRGB switching (Macs are limited to sRGB only with white-LED backlights).

I think you will be covered with either. I have a Mac Pro and looked at the specs today of the iMac; it looks relatively comparable except I opted for the 8 core- 2 X 2.4 GHz Quad.

I run Adobe Design Premium products like Dreamweaver and Illustrator. I use Eclipse to write PHP on my localhost.

I'm very pleased with how it runs. I use Mackeeper periodically to clear all the cache that is generated when I feel like it needs a bit of cleanup.

The new Mac Mini base model even should more than cover you, I'm doing a fair amount of dev work on my 13" MBP base model with 16GB ram and an SSD and even with XCode, MSVS2008 and GIMP I have no hassles running iTunes and 3 browsers for testing.
People seem to be massively underestimating these new gen intel processors.
At the office they have us working on 4 year old core 2 duo machines and I struggle to even slow those down with all sorts of dev tools and DB's running.

Mooey said:

My question is which would be better for what I do at work?

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Any Mac model can easily handle web development tasks.

NVWebsites said:

I use Mackeeper periodically to clear all the cache that is generated when I feel like it needs a bit of cleanup.

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I highly recommend you uninstall MacKeeper. You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Some can even degrade, rather than improve system performance.

Some remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process. These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space.

Some of these apps delete caches, which can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt. Caches exist to improve performance, so deleting them isn't advisable in most cases.

Many of the tasks performed by these apps should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.

I think I commented on this in the other thread, but I now do more than what you're looking to do on a 2007 iMac. I think you're good either way

13" macbook pro or air, and some ~$200 24" or 27" screen with some converter plug should probably be enough for you.

I would have recommend the 27" iMAC for web design. This thing is an absolute beauty to work with. And the resolution is twice of most monitors of the same size. But if you already have monitors... I guess the mac mini would suffice.