

Ask HN: Development on a 13" air? - mbrzuzy

Basically I'm looking to get a new laptop and for the longest time I've been contemplating getting an air.  Why? Because they're extremely portable and especially light (my current gateway laptop's weight is 6lbs).<p>Are airs suited for development? The only thing I can think of is that maybe the 13" screen will be too small since the specs on the new models are quite impressive.<p>From home I'll be working on a desktop anyway, but this will be something to bring to hackernests and school.
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Pewpewarrows
The 13" Air (top-end model) is now my primary development machine. I couldn't
live without it at this point. Even if a 15" model existed I don't think I
would have gone with it. The 13" feels like the perfect sweet spot between
portability and performance.

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bengl3rt
Seconded. Once the Air can run two external monitors over Thunderbolt I can
ditch my desktop.

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wavephorm
I thought the Air's already had thunderbolt. Is the video card not capable of
2 monitors yet?

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bengl3rt
Right. It has the smaller, less powerful TB controller that only supports one
monitor. Hoping this will change in future generations as they try to create a
super-thin 15" pro machine as well.

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dpezely
Why change machines when at your desk versus elsewhere? That sounds like an
'rsync' accident waiting to happen.

I've been using the first generation 11.6" Air which replaced a unibody 15".
Other than FreeBSD and Linux servers racked elsewhere, this Air is my
"everything" machine.

My tricks for the smaller screen:

Keep windows overlapping with just enough visible underneath to indicate
status, and of course set the Dock to auto-hide. e.g., Mail window is on far
right with little more than the scroll bar showing, so I can still see whether
the horizontal cursor/bar is at bottom of that window or not, which indicates
new mail. Of course, when I'm deep into code-mode, I don't want the
distraction of email anyway until I come up to breathe, so it's one less
distraction.

Likewise for Terminal. I have less than one row of text visible underneath
Emacs, VMware and browsers. This is just enough to see if a background
compilation or other task is still running. Again, like email-- one less
distraction unless and until I want to be aware of it.

In Emacs, I'm using my own build of 24.0.50 with 185x46 character resolution
and make heavy use of 'split-window-horizontally instead of 'split-window-
vertically which I used predominantly on earlier machines since 1989.

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tyw
I love mine (2010 13" version, wouldn't mind the bump to the i5 processor but
I get by on the core2duo). Definitely max out the ram (not sure if you even
get a choice anymore). I mostly use it for LAMP-style web development; but I
do some J2EE as well, and it'll handle running Eclipse or IntelliJ plus Tomcat
just fine. Builds take about twice as long as my 3.33 GHz desktop, but again
if you get the newer i5/i7 version it'll be a less noticeable speed hit.

If I'm working at a remote location for a week or more, I'll drag along my 27"
apple monitor and set it up and use an external keyboard and mouse...
currently set up that way, in fact.

I doubt I'll ever go back to a larger laptop, I love the air.

~~~
mbrzuzy
Glad you're having a good time with it. I mostly do LAMP-style development as
well. It looks like the majority of people who posted in this thread love the
13" MBA for development.

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pashields
When I travel or feel like hacking somewhere besides my desk, I work on an 11"
air with an i7. The screen size is tight if you spend a lot of time in IDEs
(for me, eclipse and xcode). When I'm able to work in emacs, I have more than
enough room.

The only other thing really worth considering is RAM. If you are a web
developer I suspect this isn't too much of an issue. I find that running xcode
and eclipse together produces some swapping.

Surprisingly, I noticed a ton of airs at strange loop earlier this week, so
they seem to be doing ok with hacker crowd.

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Tycho
Any heat or battery problems with the i7?

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pashields
Battery doesn't last nearly as long (only about 3 hours of real work). It also
runs hotter, but that hasn't been a problem.

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athst
I have the 13" i7, and for me it's great for web development (I do rails). The
three-finger swipe to switch full screens introduced with Lion is actually
really awesome for doing terminal stuff.

The screen size only becomes a problem if you're doing stuff like Xcode
development with the iPhone simulator open, because there just isn't a lot of
space. In that case I much prefer to have a big monitor, like 27".

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_pius
I just moved from a 17" MBP to a fully loaded 13" Air and I love it ... no
regrets at all. Generally more than enough horsepower and screen real estate
for both Rails coding (in TextMate) and iOS programming (in XCode).

The only annoyance I've dealt with is that the Storyboard feature in XCode is
practically made for a large screen device.

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toumhi
I'm doing web development on a 13" air, with eclipse, a virtualbox ubuntu
running as a staging server, and it works like a charm.

I didn't notice a loss in productivity as I was afraid of, and I really love
the portability. I brought it to Southeast Asia for 5 months this year -
really liked that it didn't weigh too much!

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TuaAmin13
I like my 13" MBP. It's an older model, so I don't know the screen res off
hand, but if you can upgrade for more pixels that'd be good. Some IDEs get
cluttery without enough pixels. What I've got is fine though.

Like pashields I'm crunched for RAM so go on Newegg and buy the max you can
put in that machine.

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Toddward
RAM on MBAs is not upgradeable - it's soldered to the motherboard.

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TuaAmin13
That's unfortunate, but understandable considering how much they squeezed into
the machine.

Thanks for the correction.

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TWSS
I keep hearing that they're coming out with a 15" MBA next year. I'm on a 15"
MBP now, and while the weight kills my shoulder on longer jaunts, I can't see
giving up the screen real estate (I'm a front-end designer/developer and spend
a lot of time in CS5 and eclipse).

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dlikhten
I do it now. 13 inch air is a most wonderful tool. Fast small light, what more
can you ask for. I do lots of dev on the bus actually. I am running the lowest
end 13 inch model. dual core i5 4gb ram 128gb ssd. Its excellent.

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gpacaci
That's my plan, too. I think it's a pretty decent machine, but of course it
depends on your development environment. I think it'll be quite fine for me
with VS 2010.

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perezda
13" is just too small for me. I'm on a 15" MBP and love it. Yeah, would love
it more if it was lighter.

