Macbook Air as a developer tool?

Question

macbook

There are many owners of the latest generation of Macbook Air 13 among Habrahabr users. Are
there hardcore programmers among them?
Hardcore are those who write code for at least 8 hours a day and this is their main and favorite pastime.
who doesn’t get in the way of a tiny screen and small print?
And most importantly, how many of those who couldn’t program on a Macbook Air and changed the configuration to another one? Why?
Success stories, pitfalls, personal experience and the experience of friends, please comment.

Answer 1

Worked for Air 13, the first generation, then the second. The first generation for development is poorly applicable, because. it heats up quite strongly and the assembly of projects turns into torture. Noise and overheating were the main drawbacks. After a while, I changed it to the second generation with an SSD.
The second generation with SSD is faster than my proshka 13 without SSD! 100% suitable for any development. 13 inches is enough for coding, eyes get tired only in the evening. I code for 8-10 hours a day, plus I watch movies and surf, for a total of 14 hours somewhere at the computer. There is no noise from it, you can work at night (the first generation of Air was noisy).
Now I gave Air to my wife, and I took 13 for myself. I can say that Air works faster, especially noticeable when assembling, and then when starting up and checking what I have coded.
The only drawback of the Air is the display without a black frame.
I do not use a mouse, the trackpad is fine.
The keyboard is backlit, again, you can work at night. The keys are pressed clearly, there are usually no misses. But after half a year, the buttons began to click a little stronger and some were polished.
Building in Eclipse (FDT). Xcode.

Answer 2

I've been working on a white Macbook 12" for two years now. I don't think it makes any difference with the Air. Not very hardcore, but often you have to sit for several hours without looking up.
I never thought that the screen and font were tiny, I never had a wider monitor The
main inconvenience is that the back starts to hurt from sitting for a long time, after all, the monitor should be higher, at eye level, so that you don’t have to cringe. And sometimes you want to open 2-3 windows at the same time (console, debugger and editor), with 12 "this is unrealistic .
So I plan to buy myself an external monitor and a normal ergonomic keyboard. At home, it will be possible to work normally, and in which case you can take a laptop on the road.

Answer 3

If you really want a Mac, I would recommend the MacBook Pro. For the money, it's close. But, you can add memory, upgrade the screw (including on SSD), and there is a backlight for the keys (which is also a big plus for some, compared to Air'om)

Answer 4

I have Air 11", and I program on it when I'm not sitting at the desktop. Including in a very resource-intensive environment (Scala / IntelliJ IDEA). The flight is normal. This is not a netbook, this is a normal machine.

Answer 5

Now I'm working on 13". Not air, on Packard Bell BG46 - it's Dual Core, 2 GB - in general, far from being a tractor.
I have an IntelliJ IDEA editor, and the small keyboard and lack of a mouse made me learn how to use hotkeys. This, I'll tell you, it turned out to be the most correct choice (IntelliJ and hotkeys). Except that the screen is small in height and this is the only thing that depresses.
As for air, I also think about it very much, well, I will wait for the new version on Sandy Bridge in August, because I will most likely use Windows there, and according to rumors, air with Windows lives for 2-3 hours.Why
air - because it is comfortable to wear and it has good opportunities to connect an external monitor via display port!

Answer 6

I worked for a while on a MacBook Air 11''. The screen is small, of course, but even 22'' is not enough.
But in terms of power - quite enough. There is a fairly powerful processor, enough memory (even 2 GB is enough, but you can order 4 GB) and, most importantly, an SSD. A large Java project was indexed faster in IDEA than on a Mac Pro.
By the way, in any case, for development, I would advise taking a poppy or something with Linux (but from windows to poppy, IMHO, it's easier to change than to Linux, due to the lack of problems with hardware). By reseeding on a poppy (as on a Unix system), I lost tons of headaches associated with installing various dev software.

Answer 7

Now I work on MBP 17", but gradually I switch to a bunch of Air 13" + 24" monitor.
The meaning of the replacement is to often carry a laptop with you, and having 2 laptops is expensive. It has enough power in everything, the main tools are MAMP, MacVim , Firefox. But sitting all day at 13 "with 1440x900, I began to notice that in the evening there was pain in my eyes.