Ask HN: Do you use a 11“ MacBook Air for development?

1 point·kcovia··2 comments

I'm considering getting a 11" MacBook Air soon. The portability sounds great, as I have an old MacBook Pro 13" now and it's rather heavy.

The only concern, of course, is that it's too small. Seems like an external monitor would solve any issues, though. What are your experiences?

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For me the limit is its dual-core-ness. I currently use a 13" Air as my main development machine and for most tasks it's fine. The resolution on the 11" is bearable, although I notice the difference. I also think the screen bezel is ugly at the 11" size.

When it comes to pushing out multiple VMs to simulate various real-life scenarios the 8G limit comes into play and it's not always sufficient. My earlier MBP w/ 16G was fine.

If I could have a 13" Retina Air with 16-32G I'd be a Very Happy Boy. As it is I suspect I'll be moving back to an MBP after the Broadwell shift and I can get 32G DDR4. Until then I likely won't make a change.

I'm totally blind so the small screen is not a problem for me. I use a 2013 air with the 1.7 GHZ processor, 8 gigs of ram, and a 256 gig SSD for development when booted into Windows. I find that it works well for most things but I do find my self going to my desktop if I am doing heavy database work or virtual machines which will be used heavily. The keyboard is decent but I find myself sometimes plugging in an external keyboard if I'm sitting at a desk and know I'm going to be typing for a while.

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