Not a pointless question at all. Came up at a local UG in NYC last week. One dev is using a 13" air as their primary dev machine. I'm a little concerned by the limit of 4Gb RAM, but they are reporting really good experienced with the fast disk I/O making up for the limited RAM.
Personally I use a MBP 15" with 8Gb RAM, but in addition to Ruby and Rails I do Groovy and Grails (and Scala and some Clojure) so I usually have IntelliJ and/or Eclipse open so the extra RAM is useful. If you're using textmate (or emacs or vi) and Rails, any processor intensive test suites might be a little slower than with a faster processor, but with gems like autotest and spork that is less of an issue. I'd say "go for it". But understand there are some limitations. You're going to want to get the external DVD for loading software, and if it's anything like my first generation Air, you're gonna be shocked by how few ports you have. You have to pay an Apple tax just to get a connector to be able to plug into ethernet, for example. Still, great portability. I'm still on the fence about getting one as a conference laptop. Best Wishes, Peter On Jan 24, 2011, at 7:04 PM, Ollie wrote: > Pointless question I know as an experienced programmer can work with > any hardware but I wanted some opinions on the new macbook air 13". > > My current PC which is a 1.2ghz dual core with 4gb of ram is on it's > last legs. I've been running ubuntu and while the machine hasn't been > lightning quick it gets the job done. So I was thinking of getting the > new MBA with 1.86ghz and 4GB of ram and was wondering whether anyone > had any experience with it, I just need to kick round rails and push > my projects up to heroku. The only heavy thing I have to deal with is > some large databases around 40mb. Does the SSD help? Right now I can't > stretch to a MBP 15" and I need to replace this week so any advice > would be appreciated. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
