I’m trying to decide between a 13″ MacBook Pro or a 13″ Mac Air. Portability is a nice to have, but my no means not essential. Travel will include riding the subway. The light weight factor and high resolution of the Air are huge draws though. What I’m wondering is, will the 2011 Air be able to handle a VM + Windows 7 + Visual Studio.NET? (possibly Eclipse). I will be using it for iPhone development and when needed, VS.NET development. Possibly, with Eclipse a bit of Java dev.
Or should I go with the 13″ MacBook Pro and throw in an extra 4 gigs of Ram for 8GB and an SSD drive?
Cheers all!
Just to add, I went into Best Buy to give them both a trial run and noticed immediately that the AIR did not handle video quite as well as the Pro did. Might be splitting hairs a little, but did maximize and resize the screen took a little longer on the AIR. Of course, I’m only talking split seconds here, but it was certainly a little sluggish.
Yes.
If you are running VM’s 8Gb is really good to have.
It’s not actually as if the 13″ MBP is particularly heavy and isn’t much thicker than the Air at the Air’s thickest point. Also, you can have a much bigger hard disk drive which is also a factor when you are running VM’s.
In fact, I have a 15″ MBP which allows you an even bigger screen and a proper GPU so you can play games on it as a displacement activity. I have no problems with carrying it around although it’s a little bit too big to use comfortably in a tourist class seat on an aeroplane.