Recommendations - iMAC or MacBook Pro

MBP 13" with Dell 24" WPF2408 - portability, performance, colours. Best bang for buck IMO.

i’ve used an iMac 24 for almost 2 years now. My MBPro 15 was nothing but trouble - i think it was a 2nd Gen release - i never buy the first but i’ve got a couple of white macbooks that are rock solid, except for the brittle cases.. It’s a good combination. The iMac 24 is probably the best desktop I have ever worked on and unless you’re a hardcore video editor, running maya or some other crazy-intensive software.. the iMac makes sense over the Mac Pro which is just too costly.

My biggest consideration, besides getting old and needing the sharp screen.. is if you’re a MODx person then you’re probably prone to working in text editors and the large screen is a big help when you have a lot of text editing going on. it’s not uncommon to have photoshop, coda, terminal, documents and several other things all running at once in the middle of a web project and the 24" screen really helps make that work.

That’s why I love the combination of a notebook and a large screen. You get the advantage of the portable (reading MODx forums in bed at 1 AM) and two screens to work with!

Absolutely - that’s what I was looking into doing now - I have decided Im going the Macbook Pro route - with the external monitor to attach to it when needed.

So now my next thought is - is the 256 video card going to be enough power for CS4 or should I go ahead and spend on the 512 now?

Im more likely going to be picking up my Macbook Pro this week - Im freaking excited! But trying to make sure I make the right 1st purchase. My wife has the regular Macbook with 1 gig ram and simple video card - (its about 3 years old) and she loves it.

If the 256 is going to suffice for my graphic/web development work for the video card (then I can save quite a bit of bucks here) then I will opt that route. Does the 2.53 or 2.66 really make much of a difference on the Macs?

I have the 256 and it’s nice and fast running the CS4 suite (illy, photoshop, flash etc), but with one exception - fireworks CS4 - which runs like a dog compared to CS3.

Snow Leopard should take advantage of the 512MB quite nicely, though I’m not sure how much an advantage that will bring. You’ll likely see benchmarks for using GPU as a processor starting next week, since it looks like 10.6 is going to be released on Friday.