
Ask HN: Macbook Air or Pro for Visual Studio dev machine? - cbovis
I&#x27;m going to be commuting to London soon and am looking into replacing my iMac with either a Macbook Air or Pro Retina.<p>For the most part I&#x27;ll just be using it for casual web browsing etc. nothing intensive. My second use for it will be as a windows development machine, I work primarily in Visual Studio so want a machine that&#x27;s going to handle it nicely.<p>What&#x27;s your experience&#x2F;thoughts on using the 13&quot; Air as a VS machine? Does it perform well or should I look into the Pro? My plan is to go high end on the Air, potentially pushing memory to 8GB.
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Someone1234
Why get a Mac at all if you're going to be running Visual Studio? Running
Windows in a VM and then a chunky piece of software under that is not exactly
the most ideal runtime environment.

I'd get the Thinkpad T440 with the 9 cell battery. It will cost you roughly
the same as a MBA and less than a MBP.

The Thinkpad T440 is 4.0 lbs, 1 lbs heavier than a 13" MBA and between the 13"
and 15" MBP in terms of weight (as you'd expect from a 14" machine).

I will say that the Thinkpad's touchpad isn't as good as the one found on
Apple's machines (but those are industry leading). The display is also worse
(although Windows doesn't take very good advantage of the "Retina" display
anyway). However you gain more port options, battery options, you can upgrade
it, it is cheaper, and less "showy" (so less likely to get robbed, etc).

If you REALLY want to get a Mac I'd definitely get the Pro just to somewhat
counteract the VM performance loss.

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ghuntley
Definitely agree with T440 (I have the T440s) w/ 9 cell battery especially if
your commute to and from work is large. Macbook Pro + VMFusion + VS results in
< 2 hours battery life. It's much better to do native Windows 8.1 and then
VMware OSX.

You'll get 8-10 hours battery life (under load, else 16 hours), touch screen
Windows 8, touch screen OSX/iOS simulator, touch screen Android simulator and
touch screen Windows 8 Phone simulator - concurrently all at the same time.

This is my setup for cross-platform mobile dev using Xamarin. There's
something special about commuting on the train, doing iOS/Droid/WP8
development in Visual Studio without being chained to a physical mac-mini or
multiple computers.

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dennybritz
New models are expected to come out soon, so if possible I would wait for a
bit:
[http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac](http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac)

I was in a similar situation last year (coming form an old MBA) and I decided
to go with the Pro. The weight difference is not huge but noticeable. In terms
of performance you don't need to worry about the Air, it'll be able to handle
everything just fine. What really sold me on the Pro was the retina display.
Beautiful. Once used to it it's really hard to go back to non-retina. What the
Macbook Air has going for it is slightly longer battery life. So, I'd look at
it as tradeoff between retina display and battery life. Don't even worry about
performance.

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markcrazyhorse
Pro has more power. The big projects will need it. I chose a pro when I was
doing my iOS stuff as my mate has an air and Xcode just killed his resources
when running the app simulator.

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cbovis
That's interesting to know, does the Pro perform well with XCode or is it so-
so? I'm interested in looking into iOS dev with the release of Swift so XCode
is something else I'll need to keep in mind.

~~~
markcrazyhorse
Yeah the pro performs very well for me. If you are wanting to get into Swift
there are some awesome beginner tutorials here: [http://ios-blog.co.uk/swift-
tutorials/](http://ios-blog.co.uk/swift-tutorials/)

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ibytencode
My current development machine is a MBPR utilizing the 2.3 GHz processor & 16
GB of ram with Parallel, Windows 8.1 64 Bit, and VS 2013 Professional without
issue.

We chose the MBPR displays because we could pick them up the next day and
didn't have to wait on the build time for the T440s. I cannot say I didn't
really look at those, but I did and would have probably purchased those if we
weren't on such a time crunch.

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mlin6436
I was in the exact situation before, and landed with an Air (top spec).

It really depends on what things you wanna run on it. A VS, even inside a VM,
the Air can handle the job easily. But if you want to run more programs on it,
it will burn!

The upside of Air is the battery is awesome endless, giving that you don't
have a lot programs running. On the other hand, and is the reason why I'd
choose a Pro in the future, the retina screen!

~~~
cbovis
Generally if I'm in my dev environment then it'll be Visual Studio, SQL Server
and a web browser that's typically open.

The battery is a definite win for the Air, do you know if it gets similar
battery life in Bootcamp? I know there are optimizations in OS X designed to
improve battery..

I originally thought that weight might give the Air an advantage since I'll be
carrying it every day but it seemed like a non-issue when I went into
Stormfront so I'm tied!

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dopplesoldner
I was in a similar situation last year - but after visiting the apple store
and trying the different variations I ended up going for the 15" pro, i7 quad-
core, 16GB RAM, 512SSD and the retina display with 2880 x 1800 resolution.

It does cost more than the other 2 options but if you are a developer, it
might be worth it.

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emersonrsantos
I'd get a Pro and use OSX BootCamp to dual boot.

My i5 Air, however, has a turbo boost option that up the processor speed from
1.7ghz to 3.7ghz when it's needed, and it's very fast comparing to my i5
lenovo running anything because of SSD.

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chrisbennet
I use a pro retina 15" as my windows Dev machine.I boot to Windows (boot
camp). There is no need to run parallels or VM if you don't need OSx
simultaneously.

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joshuaellinger
You'll want the 16GB ram on the bigger one if you are running any databases
locally. Otherwise, 8GB will work.

Did you consider the Yoga? It looks pretty competitive.

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cbovis
I'll be looking at running it as OS X primarily since I'm heavily in that
ecosystem and prefer it to Windows, I'll just be bootcamping from time-to-time
for my .NET development :)

