
Ask HN: Macbook Air for Development? - teddyuk
hello, I am thinking of replacing my dell xps 15 (9550) - 32gb&#x2F;uhd touchscreen display.<p>I use vs code and sometimes visual studio or intellij (scala&#x2F;java)<p>I don&#x27;t think I have ever used more than about 12gb ram even when pushing the system with vm&#x27;s and with docker nowadays i don&#x27;t get anywhere near that.<p>Does anyone else use a macbook air (8gb) - at about £900 they seem much more reasonably priced than mac book pro&#x27;s - if I ever did need to do any real heavy lifting I could use my old xps.
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karmakaze
I don't know how tied you are to macOS, but I had an Apple gift card and
thought about the Air, instead tried an iPad Pro to see what it was about.
Returned it and got a Surface Go. What's this got to do with your question?
Well after getting the Go, I realized that the larger Surface tablet is
actually much closer to the form factor I'm interested in. Light, runs an OS
and apps. With WSL and soon WSL2 it will feel much more unixy.

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shubb
Every time I get an underpowered developer laptop in the interests of mobility
I regret it. When you do hit the ceiling, you end up doing some wierd
workaround e.g. 'I'll just run all my docker on a server'. The sacrifice for
the workaround is not accetable long term.

If you need mobility, my suggestion is to get a powerful laptop without caring
about mobility much, and a little netbook for road work.

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pinewurst
There's a significant (IMHO) difference in CPU between the Air (2 core
i5-8210Y) and the 13" Pro (4 core i5-8279U).

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ConfusedDog
BestBuy is selling MBA 2018 16GB/512GB for $1,150 since yesterday... I bought
one.

Performance wise, it is definitely not as good as MBP line, especially now
with MBP base line quad-core CPUs.

I was using MBP 13 2015 with similar Geekbench score as this MBA, so I think
it's going to be okay.

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benologist
The Air is a 7 watt dual-core CPU, your Dell is 45 watt quad core. The ram
might be comparable but any compilation, build, vm startup etc will be
significantly slower. You could still code on it but you're going to be much
more constrained.

