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Comment by pgbovine | Hacker News Reader

i will +1 his love for the 11" MacBook Air ... people are always skeptical that i can do pretty much all of my work on it (yes, even some coding), but after almost two years, i still haven't found its small size to be too limiting.

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Has the small size affected your vision?

I've briefly tried working on a small screen with high DPI and it really hurt my eyes. Maybe I'm getting old-man's eyes. ;)

Same here. I currently have an older (mid 2009) 15" mbp. Wondering if I can get by on a 13" though...

If you get a new 13" Retina MBP, you'll have the best of all worlds. If you need a lower res, you got it. If you need a higher res, you got it.

I hadn't anticipated this but since every resolution looks excellent on a retina display, I'm switching quite often for different tasks.

Thanks for the anecdote. I will indeed check out the 13" retina.

High DPI should be better for your eyes and easier to read as the jaggies will be less visible. This does assume that you keep sizes the same and just put more pixels into every element.

I'm on 13", simply because I don't see the benefits of the 11" as that significant. General principle is very much the same, though.

I had a netbook that size. I liked everything about the form factor, it was just cripplingly slow.

a macbook air is in no way similar to a netbook other than in physical dimensions.

Which would be why I was commenting on what I thought of the form factor, i.e. the physical dimensions.

If someone read that as implying that my netbook was slow, therefore a MacBook Air would be too, I have to question their reading comprehension skills.

What are the differences?

Processor, memory, keyboard, touchpad, display, storage, and build quality. Well, and price.

I lasted almost two months on my 11" MacBook Air before hooking it up to a 27" Thunderbolt Display in a fit of desperation. As my traveling machine it's fantastic, but I prefer my iMac as a full time dev machine.

(I mostly do Cocoa dev in Xcode these days.)

I guess I assume that's a given. I'm getting one of those cheap 27" super high res displays off ebay to compliment my MBA. It handles everything I do, but I also have a server that I run my heavy code on because it's where my data is. At the same time, I pretty much constantly have a VM running on here and I get good enough battery life.

I also have a monitor though of course. I would go crazy alt+tabbing. Even now the width of my display can't handle my open tabs in Sublime.

edit: though... now that I sit here and realize what I'm saying, 80% of the time I code, I do it on the MBA. The DPI is such that I prefer the font when coding. This will change when I get my new display though. The laptop will sit on a dock and be my doc-dock or my stream a movie while I work-dock.

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