Tuesday, November 26, 2013

MacBook Air 11" as Dev Machine

I truly got back interior from Seattle, wherever I went to attend and converse next to Voices to facilitate Matter. The VTM people plunk on a horrendous league, as until the end of time, and I'll own more to say around to facilitate in upcoming blog posts. But, I wanted to quickly attend to a question I've been asked numerous epoch this weekend both larger than Twitter and in real life. That question was "how productive were you able to be with truly an 11" MacBook Air?"

If you chase me on Twitter, you know to facilitate in the same way as years of using Apple's biggest and for the most part powerful laptops (17" MacBooks and 17" PowerBooks or that), I bought Apple's smallest, slightest powerful solitary. This weekend, I absolute to conduct test by wandering very light. Besides the MacBook Air, my notebook bag had an iPad2, a Clear 4G+, the various cables and power cords representing persons strategy, and a mechanical pencil, nothing more. My whole bag weighed 6 pounds, which was quite a revolution from the atrocity I typically own with me what time I travel to conferences. With a better notebook comes a better bag with more extent representing cargo space to facilitate as usual gets packed with things I might maybe maybe need.

So, how'd it handiwork improbable?

Absolutely flawlessly. Despite being considerably a reduced amount of powerful, the 11" MacBook Air rarely feels long-winded credit to the SSD. Certain things take noticeably longer (compiling fat applications), but the vast majority of day-to-day tasks feel downright snappy.

The screen is small, but it's a pretty high spot pixel density, so it's not quite as confining as you might expect. With a a small number of changes to my coding practice, which built-in departing from Menlo-10 to Menlo-9 as my coding font, and committing the Xcode recipe commands to to pelt and fair panes to recall, I quickly developed into a workflow to facilitate worked really, really well representing me.

There may well own been a very slight thump to productivity, but it wasn't bad, and it was more than offset by the piece of information to facilitate I can consume the laptop anywhere, even sitting in coach. My 17" MacBook Pro is basically unusable in coach if the person in front of me reclines their seat. And the person in front of me until the end of time reclines their seat. I got a solid 4 or 5 hours of coding in yesteryear to facilitate I wouldn't own gotten with my larger laptop.

So, yeah. It worked improbable horrendous.

A link of epoch this weekend, I was furthermore asked a interrelated question, which is "could you consume it as your foremost development robot?".

The answer to to facilitate is "I can, but probably wouldn't would like to". However, that's since of factors to facilitate probably don't blow for the most part developers. The nature of several of our clients (sorry I can't be more individual than that) way to facilitate a lot in life of our mockups and images show your face to us as very, very, very fat Photoshop annals with lots of layers. I smoothly own to deal with Photoshop annals to facilitate are a gigabyte in size or better.

If it weren't representing to facilitate, and my irregular dabbling in 3D graphics encoding, I absolutely can consume this robot chock-full stage. During piece of information, an 11" MacBook Air with a 27" Apple exhibit, would be a very gifted iPhone dev robot representing for the most part developers, though I would absolutely pay money for the "ultimate configuration" if you are looking next to getting solitary.

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