Hence why I use 1 Mac and a pile of VM’s
Or one PC with a pile of VMs
You get awfully close to the end results but there can still be some things where a VM is different and a real piece of hardware is required.
But that will really depend on what kind of app it is you’re writing.
I have less hardware now than ever before and used to be like Scott & had xServes, a bunch of Macs & PC’s and gigantic electric bills.
It’s only expensive if you are not in business to support your application on these platforms. For what we do, supporting some of these platforms is under contract, so we need them around. An example is two US government divisions still run OS X 10.4.11 on Quad-core G5 Power Macs. Another state-wide school contract has us supporting 10.3.9 Server on G4 1.33GHz Xserves.
If we were looking at 1 or two users, I might think about it differently, but for the revenue impact that these contracts provide to my company, it’s a very small investment.
If only all users ran to the latest and greatest when Apple or Microsoft released a new version…
I use a Mac mini with few VMs, and a Macbook Pro with triple boot: OS X, Windows and Ubuntu Linux (rEFInd as boot manager). Also have other machines and virtual servers, but for developing those are enough for me.
Buy a used Mac, put an application in the App Store, and it will be paid for in no time. Serious.
i used VirtualBox with multiple version of Windows
Ebay is great because you can get a cheap computer which will used only for testing purposes.