So, I've sort of started thinking about a fund raiser for bringing krita to OSX, properly. I know it'll take at least three, four months, because that's what it took for Windows, too. I'm doing some detailed planning on that score, but that's still preliminary.

But I also know that porting Krita to OSX properly will need the developer (me...) to live in OSX for a while, if only to assimilate the environment.

My current mac is a 2012 or so Mac Mini, which is too slow to use for daily work, let alone development. The question is, what's the minimum Mac that would work for doing serious development. And Krita is serious development, with its hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ code. Mac fans, please give your answers on a postcard (or this forum).

There are two options: Mac Pro, which is basically a cheap way of buying a pair of expensive graphics cards; or the top-end iMac, which is an expensive laptop which isn't portable.

Unless you plan to concentrate on optimising for the Mac Pro market (i.e. get the graphics cards working hard enough that performance is better than an iMac); then the iMac makes much more sense. The SSD in the iMac is PCI-Express based like the Pro, and so read/write are up in the 600Mbps+ range. The 4Ghz i7 in the iMac is faster for a lot of benchmarks than the Xeons in the Mac Pro.

Hm... That's a good point. The problem with iMacs is that I'd need to add another desk, they're so big! I don't think we'd need a mac pro, the main things are fast disk so building doesn't take ages and, I guess, a retina screen one way or another so we can make sure krita looks good on that.