I've been coding on an air for the past 4 years and, although its old, it still works great. I just bought the new MBP retina with 16gb ram upgrade because of the GPU, which i use for data modeling and simulation. IMHO, if you aren't trying to do lots of heavy number crunching, stick with the air. In terms of ROR, they both will do the job very well. Just make sure you get the SSD, its a huge leap for performance and heat. Maybe with the savings you can pick up a quad core mini server, which is even better for ROR development :)
Dave On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 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
