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efzFlag for United States of America

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Recommend a Mac for using Firemonkey

I recently purchased Embarcadero’s Delphi XE2 and had some interest in experimenting with porting code over to a Mac. I called Embarcardero for purposes of asking what type of Mac I should purchase and after two call transfers, the technician told me he could not recommend a specific Mac machine, He said that whatever the machine it should have OSX 10.7 (Lion) and iOS 4.3. I thought it was curious that the company that touts this multi-platform development package (Firemonkey?) wouldn’t be able to recommend a specific Mac computer, so I called Apple. After three call transfers, the “specialist” said he never heard of Embarcadero, never heard of Firemonkey, said iOS was for the iPad etc. and not for a Mac. He never mentioned simulation software and said he was unable to recommend a Mac that would be suitable for my purposes. Instead he wanted me to pay $99 to become a developer (which I don’t mind, but I wanted to know what I’m getting in to first).

My company develops relatively simplistic software that is used for filling government forms. About as complicated as we get is using TLabel, TEdit, and TCheckbox components. I’m ready to purchase a Mac, but I wanted to make sure I purchased one that would suit the purpose. Can anyone with experience in this area make a recommendation? Many thanks.
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MichaelStaszewski
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Dave Baldwin
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Mac mini starts @ $599. You can use keyboard, mouse, monitor that you already have. I picked up my Mac mini for $699 and picked up compatible RAM on Amazon for $50 to bump it up to 8 GB. You can get into a mac for a bit less than $999 especially if it's only for testing. This is *not* traditional development on a Mac so I'd start by researching XE2/Firemonkey development and see what is required, but I'm fairly certain that your Mac will just be a test platform.
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Thanks. Your info is greatly appreciated.