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Ask HN: How is your web development experience on the base model 13" MBA 2013?

1 points by frapbot ↗ HN
Because that's what I can really afford right now on a third-world country , entry-level salary.

Specs: 1.3GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz, 4GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM, 128GB Flash Storage

Follow-up: Given that SSDs are still expensive, is 128GB internal storage enough? (I'll get some external drives of course). Thanks HN!

6 comments

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blakehaswell
I’ve been using a 11" Macbook Air (2011 model, 4GB of RAM) for the past 2 years as my primary dev machine and it hasn’t skipped a beat.

I’ve worked on everything from Spring projects to NodeJS projects, and I’ve used editors including Eclipse, WebStorm, and Sublime Text 2. I’m also a heavy Photoshop and Illustrator user.

Occasionally I have experienced problems where I’ve run out of physical memory while running Photoshop, Illustrator, WebStorm, and Chrome at the same time, but those problems have been very rare. Those problems have also been non-existent since switching from WebStorm to Sublime Text 2.

I would definitely recommend an Air as a dev machine, but get a memory upgrade if you can afford it.

benologist
I've developed on a 2011 MBA running Windows + SQL Server + Visual Studio etc in a virtual machine which is a heavy combination. The only real drawback is virtual machines don't have many cores to share which may or may not matter. With Mavericks my MBA is screaming fast although it's always felt very fast.

I've worked on Haxe, Android, Xcode, NodeJS, .NET, Unity3d and Flash, along with accompanying software like Photoshop and Fireworks, and backend stuff like Postgres, MongoDB, Redis etc. A lot of this was simultaneously since my old startup provided APIs for a bunch of different platforms.

frapbot
On a 128GB internal SSD?
benologist
256gb, 4gb of ram, dual core i7.

Virtual machines and Android SDKs use a lot of space but I believe the 2013 has usb3 which means an external drive will be very fast.

chaffneue
I have an 11" Macbook Air from 2011 and it's been great. Went from snow leopard all the way to mavericks without a hitch. Use it mostly for web coding stacks have been Java, Python, Scala, PHP and the occasional Photoshop/Xcode. The only environment I have a hard time with was Scala just because the compiler is a bit of a beast, especially when getting a project up and running with SBT where a new artifact could be added every day or two. I ended up offloading Scala compiles to my home PC, but you could probably get a cheap VPS for the same effect. Great little machine, make sure to only use homebrew or your own source compiles and never trust the Apple shipped packages. Also go with the most storage you can afford - it's annoying to run out.
frapbot
Thanks! How do you handle storage? Upgrading from 128GB to 256GB is pretty pricey. What do I do if I stick to the base storage?