Right now I have a laptop hooked up to a 24" monitor. It is sweet. The nice thing about having it as a laptop is if you have to go collaborate you can go to a

Right now I have a laptop hooked up to a 24" monitor. It is sweet. The nice thing about having it as a laptop is if you have to go collaborate you can go to a meeting room and both sit down with your laptops. As opposed to, i don't know, really... At my current work I often save a lot of time (and save myself from abject boredom), by bringing my laptop into meetings that are not really relevant to me, and hacking until the part of the meeting that I need to pay attention to is happening. It seems that you are very insistent on the idea that the iMac will cause work to take place in the office. Really what it will do is cause work to not take place other places. Lets say I have an iMac and we really need to get X feature over the goal line soon. If i want to put in a couple of extra hours at night to do that, I'll have to stay at the office. I don't particularly like the office (and its spooky at night there...), so I'll probably not do that. If I have a laptop, I'll probably just unplug the laptop at 5:00 and take the darn thing home. Then I can work on whatever while eating caviar and watching MythBusters on FULL Cable, because of the billions in stock options i've made from our AWESOME web app. I mean, if you want people to be at the office most of the time, I think you are well within your rights as an employer to say, 'Hey, i expect you to be here between X-hour and Y-hour'. Anyway, iMac and Dell sounds very branded. I'd go with solid laptops running some version of Linux (whatever you are deploying on), and the nicest/biggest secondary screens that you can get on the cheap.