Coding/Programming: Macbook Air or Pro?

[LazyManc]

I'm going to go against the grain here and say people are massively over-speccing the kind of hardware you actually need. I'm a web dev contractor and still use a 2011 1.7ghz air with 4gb ram as my daily machine. While it's getting a bit long in the tooth and probably due an upgrade, it's still great for running Chrome, PHPStorm, and a VM or two.

Even the base model 13" Macbook Air has more than enough power to use as a dev machine so the only thing that you should base the decision on is which is more important to you - portability or the retina screen. Once you've made the decision by all means spec it up as much as you can afford for future proofing, but understand that you don't actually *need* it.

The biggest improvement you can make to a dev environment is a second screen, so if you've already got that sorted then you're good to go (the Air will need an adaptor if you've not got displayport input).

 

[lamboman]

I'm going to go against the grain here and say people are massively over-speccing the kind of hardware you actually need. I'm a web dev contractor and still use a 2011 1.7ghz air with 4gb ram as my daily machine. While it's getting a bit long in the tooth and probably due an upgrade, it's still great for running Chrome, PHPStorm, and a VM or two.

Even the base model 13" Macbook Air has more than enough power to use as a dev machine so the only thing that you should base the decision on is which is more important to you - portability or the retina screen. Once you've made the decision by all means spec it up as much as you can afford for future proofing, but understand that you don't actually *need* it.

The biggest improvement you can make to a dev environment is a second screen, so if you've already got that sorted then you're good to go (the Air will need an adaptor if you've not got displayport input).

I do mostly agree with this, however I wouldn't say that buying a Mac with 4GB of RAM now is a good idea anyway. The upgrade isn't expensive at all, so you might as well do it.

I certainly wouldn't want to run a Windows VM on a machine with 4GB of RAM. It'd work but you wouldn't be able to do much else without it paging and slowing down. Linux VM, easily fine on that much.

 

[Fallen god]

I'm going to go against the grain here and say people are massively over-speccing the kind of hardware you actually need. I'm a web dev contractor and still use a 2011 1.7ghz air with 4gb ram as my daily machine. While it's getting a bit long in the tooth and probably due an upgrade, it's still great for running Chrome, PHPStorm, and a VM or two..

I felt this way till I upgraded, now my old machine is junk and I could never work on it. Its not impossible but its a lot faster to work on better hardware, the only real thing I would suggest too anyone is using 16gb ram since VMs will eat into things and once you start to have more things open it will start to page and that will greatly reduce your speed.

If your also using a VM as a dev server having more cores is great, I can give my dev server 2/4 cores depending on how heavy the workload is and still have 4/6 cores left for my host OS. PHP is already slow as, and using slower harder own makes things worst.

 

[LazyManc]

I felt this way till I upgraded, now my old machine is junk and I could never work on it. Its not impossible but its a lot faster to work on better hardware, the only real thing I would suggest too anyone is using 16gb ram since VMs will eat into things and once you start to have more things open it will start to page and that will greatly reduce your speed.

If your also using a VM as a dev server having more cores is great, I can give my dev server 2/4 cores depending on how heavy the workload is and still have 4/6 cores left for my host OS. PHP is already slow as, and using slower harder own makes things worst.

If you're compiling builds regularly or heavy photoshop usage then fair enough, I can see how extra CPU/ram would make a difference. But for PHP all you need to run is a headless linux VM, terminal, a browser and some kind of text editor / IDE - none of which are even remotely slow on a 4 year old laptop. I'll probably have Skype, Messages and Airmail open in the background as well, so it's not like there's no headroom for other apps either.

I've used recent 13" MBPs on client sites for various projects, and haven't really noticed any difference from the MBA for my workflow (other than the retina screen which is lovely). Just out of interest, what are you running on your dev server that needs 4 cores?

 

[arty]

I'm going to go against the grain here and say people are massively over-speccing the kind of hardware you actually need. I'm a web dev contractor and still use a 2011 1.7ghz air with 4gb ram as my daily machine. While it's getting a bit long in the tooth and probably due an upgrade, it's still great for running Chrome, PHPStorm, and a VM or two.

I largely agree, having recently finished a Rails contract on a combination of a 2011 11" Air and an iPad Air. Personally I prefer to have a dev server in the cloud which I effectively remote to for heavy lifting, as that means the load on the client machine is kept nice and low, increasing battery life and allowing me to use pretty lightweight devices

I have just bought a new 13" Pro for a new contract, however, as that looks like it's going to be a bit more varied and I'm not sure I'll be able to do the whole thing remotely.

 

[MuvverRussia]

Got both here (MBA is my personal machine, MBP is my work machine - typing this on the latter).

Realistically an MBA will be fine for what you want to do.