I haven't owned or used either, but if you are running a virtual machine for develop ment, go for the 8 gig air at least. If you do more heavy lifting, like running oracle in a vm, I'd say future proof yourself and get the pro with 16gb. If you travel a lot, you might compromise on the pros speed for airs weight. Also the pro has a larger ssd, but I personally move most of my media to a separate storage device or to the cloud anyway, so I wouldn't care if it's mainly for web dev.
If none of those apply to you, get the air and impress your friends! Let us know how it works out! - Adam On Jul 19, 2012 12:38 AM, "Guyren Howe" <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jul 19, 2012, at 12:23 AM, Chris McCann wrote: > > I'm debating getting a new MacBook for Rails/Ruby development and can't > decide between a 13" Air or a 15" Retina. Anyone care to chime in with > their own experiences or analyses? > > > I have the previous-generation 13” Air, which was my secondary machine (I > do dev on a 27” iMac with an external 27” display, and I’ve no idea why > more developers don’t have such a setup; anyway), but which from time to > time I did dev on. By the time I loaded up postgres, text editor, web > browser with a bunch of tabs, PGAdmin, terminal, … it was all out of puff. > Mostly because it only had 4GB of RAM. > > So no doubt whatever, you need 8GB RAM. > > I just got an 11” Air maxed out. It’s running Migration Assistant right > now (which is going to take over 24 hours because it has to go via Wifi…). > I’d be happy to let you know what I make of it in a few days. > > Note that it can hook up to up to 2x27” displays. A very nice option would > be to get an Air (maybe even an 11”), and when you’re at your desk, hook it > up to Apple’s gorgeous 27” display (or even 2 of them). > > Notes on the displays: Apple’s is the best and close to the cheapest > (really!). And if you’re being rational about it, the fabulous display will > last you between 5 and 10 years, whereas the laptop might last you 3. That > makes spending on the great display to work on a much cheaper investment > than a computer. Which also brings up the point: perhaps you should buy an > external display and keep your existing laptop for a bit longer. That might > be a better investment in your productivity. > > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
