Ask HN: Development on a 13" air?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

While i do love my air i recently got a MBP 17" and i tend to use it more often now

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!