On: Ask HN: Smallest laptop that is decent for coding?

[abude]

macbook air, is no good for programming. sketching and frontend things yes, but when you start running environments within it like docker for example. it will crash.

[ben_w → abude]

The use-case is “quickly write tiny JS/PHP/Html programs”. I do that on my Air. I have never used docker and don’t really know what docker is besides a tech-de-jour.

[farzd → ben_w]

JS means using npm and node, ive heard my laptop fans go crazy at times. I'm MBP 13 inch, i7, SSD, 16GB Ram

[sgt → abude]

That's not really true though, and I know this from personal experience in the company that I work for.

We have a fairly large development team all using MacBook Air, the previous version. It's a little workhorse, but you gotta know its limitations.

It struggles a little with Java development (i.e. running NetBeans or IntelliJ), but the new version (i.e. 2019 model) will do that just fine.

[kall → abude]

If you spec it out to about 2000$, with the i7 upgrade, 16 GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, I'm pretty sure it will be plenty powerful for the majority of developers. Probably as good as the 5 year old MacBook Pro everyone still uses.

Bonus: you get a function key row

[raverbashing → abude]

You don't need to run docker for every single thing

[sgt → raverbashing]

Yes, you don't need Docker for the development environment. I do that sometimes though for convenience and for projects that I develop on only now and then.

[fredsted → abude]

Depends on the environment. You can easily run Docker containers on the new Air.