

Ask HN: 2014 13"MBA 4gb 256gb ssd, decent enough for front-end coding? - acera

I recently quit a job because the company hasn&#x27;t paid me since April. 
And i made a mistake of selling my old alienware laptop to cover for my rental and food expenses,  now I am looking for a mac machine and the best that I can afford right now is the high-end MBA.  
I&#x27;m buying a mac because I want to become familiar with it and no more gaming for me.<p>Been a java dev for 4.5years, 
and i plan to use this machine for learning new front-end tech stacks such as:<p>-angularjs<p>-nodejs<p>-python<p>-ruby<p>-no webdesign, no photoshop<p>-No more java for me, at least for now<p>My main question is:<p>- Is the specs gonna be enough until around 2016?
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duncan_bayne
If it were me, I'd buy a Lenovo Thinkpad. You get a better screen (i.e. larger
and anti-reflective), better keyboard, easier to upgrade, removable battery,
more ports ... basically it's more hacker-friendly.

Then, I'd put Linux Mint on it. My experience is that developing for almost
anything (i.e., anything other than iOS devices) is a more pleasant experience
on Linux than iOS. It's also much easier to script setup so you can set up a
working dev environment automatically (my scripts for doing that are here:
[https://github.com/duncan-bayne/mint-setup/wiki](https://github.com/duncan-
bayne/mint-setup/wiki)).

I have extensive experience working on ThinkPads (I own one, and have another
as my work machine) and Macs (both portable and desktop) and in my experience
Apple hardware and software work against developers, not with them.

In fact, the OSX experience was so bad that I championed a Vagrant-based VM
development image in preference to maintaining a bunch of iMac dev machines at
one company.

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zer00eyz
No... But only because of the lack of an upgrade path for ram.

You can add external storage but not external ram. 8gb and 128 hard drive
would be a better fit for what your looking to do!

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acera
Is the 128gb ssd enough for a dev machine?

~~~
duncan_bayne
Yup.

    
    
      $ df -kh
      Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
      /dev/sda1              110G   54G   51G  52% /
    

128GiB is plenty large enough - it's speed that's important.

