

Ask HN: Anyone swapped to a MacBook Air as a primary development machine? - lox

I'm considering swapping from my recent gen MacBook Pro and virtual machine development environment to a MacBook Air and a server in a cloud somewhere. Does anyone have any experience on this? Is the latency frustrating?<p>I'm a LAMP/Ruby developer and I typically work with databases around the 5-10GB mark, so quite light.
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pg
I have for the last 2 years. Lots of YC founders seem to. It never occurred to
me there was anything unusual about it.

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listic
How about desktops? Are they out of fashion among YC founders? I thought every
developer appreciates convenience of large screen and plenty of computing
power.

Do you/YC developers hook up your MacBook Airs to large screens or don't
bother?

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pg
I believe most people use laptops that they hook up to larger screens when at
their desks.

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epynonymous
i personally recommend a macbook pro with an i5 or better, why? the cores, the
macbook pro/air 13" use the outdated core 2 duo which supplies at best 2
cores, the i5 and i7 have 4. from a memory perspective, you'll only get 4 GB
at best with an mba, with the pros you can go to 8 GB. this is great for
running not just virtualization, but also if you're like me and you have 20
things open and running at the same time.

i dev in jquery + python + a mysql backend on fedora 14 running on vmware
fusion. it's fine on my macbook pro 13 (2.66 GHz/2 cores/8GB Memory). highly
recommend getting an SSD and maxing out the memory. my only complaint is the
number of cores, wish i could have more cores.

in terms of being able to dev on an mba, it's totally possible, it's not like
you're compiling code. so it really comes down to how much memory and how
responsive you need the machine to be. also if weight plays a role in your
decision making.

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yakto
Love my 13" MBA (2nd gen) with 2GB. Gave up a $4K 15" MBP with 8GB and SSD for
it, and haven't regretted the decision once in 3 months or so.

MBA is much quieter (fan rarely runs, when it does it's much quieter), way
more comfy on the lap or in bed, much cooler, and has a strikingly better
display (brighter, crisper, slightly smaller size no big deal since rez the
same).

I work in a Rails + MongoDB stack plus do a lot of design, so I'll routinely
have RubyMine, Photoshop, Illustrator, mongod, mongrels, 3 browsers, and a few
dozen browser tabs open at once.

If I had to make the purchase again, I'd get the 4GB model, since it's RAM
that usually limits me, even though the swapping is fast with SSD.

Miss the Firewire occasionally since I like to use a Duet to lay down guitar
tracks in Logic, but will probably get a dedicated iMac for the studio soon.

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mr_eel
I use one every day, mainly doing RoR development. I also have SQL Developer
connected to oracle for most of the day; seems more responsive than my MBP
tbh, I think it might be due to the SSD.

I also use it for image editing/gfx work.

The only time the performance has been noticeable has been installing apps via
homebrew. Compilation is — obviously — slower than my MBP, but honestly it's
not so slow that it'd worry anyone. Unless you're compiling a lot of stuff,
all the time, you're not gonna notice.

It's my primary dev machine and I love it. I heartily recommend it.

And to reiterate some of the recommendations; get the 4gig of ram. I'd also
recommend the 11" over the 13". I mean, if you're gonna get a small laptop,
you should get the smallest one you can comfortably use.

I hook mine up to an external monitor + mouse + keyboard. It's sweeeeet.

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cmer
I ditched my 15" MBP for an Air and couldn't be happier. The SSD actually
makes it feel much faster. I do the same kind of work as you do. I think
you'll be very happy with your purchase. I already converted 2 people to the
Air and they also love it.

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jgv
I use a MacBook Air for all of my work when I'm not in the office and I love
it. I could even use it as my primary dev machine at work and feel great about
it.

I'm very happy with my machine, which is a souped up 11 inch. The only
contraint is monitor size, which is easily remedied with a large external
monitor or an iPad via Air Display (<http://avatron.com/apps/air-display>).
The MacBook Air honestly feels much faster than my work MBP due to the flash
memory.

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bergie
I've been using the first-gen MacBook Air as my primary machine from around
when it was released to about a week ago when its hard drive died. A bit slow
at times, but the ease of carrying it compensates for that easily. And I've
understood the SSDs on the new ones fix the speed issue.

Depends of course on what kind of tools you expect to use. I'm a web developer
working on the PHP stack (even using a PHP-based app server instead of
Apache), so I just need a simple Ubuntu desktop with a text editor, terminal
and a browser.

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divtxt
The new Air is titled "The Next Generation of MacBooks" and, having had mine
for 2 months, I have to agree.

I expect one of the MBPs to drop the DVD and go SSD only and the result to be
some amazing improvements in weight/thinness and battery life.

My recommendation: WAIT to see if this happens in the upcoming MBP updates.
(the inventory stories seem to indicate this is 4-6 weeks away)

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grah3
I switched my primary from a macpro to the maxed 11" air back in december and
have had no problems with it. I'm also a LAMP dev and designer with some
slices for dev environments.

The screen res is workable with an external monitor and latency hasn't been an
issue so far. I recommend upping the ram to 4gb though.

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bowmande
I switched from the pain of developing Ruby on windows to a 13inch Macbook air
with 4Gb of ram and am loving it. I do ruby and mobile development on the
machine and couldn't be happier.

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rdouble
Yes. I'm making an iPhone game, and it's fine. The downsides are: the fan
spins up when I watch Youtube, and I don't really like the glossy screen.

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cosgroveb
I do this with my CR-48.

