Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?

In terms of latency, I've found that <a href="http://mosh.mit.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://mosh.mit.edu/</a> pretty much delivers on its promises.

I'm going to jump in with my own solution. I recently moved over to using a Google Chromebook running Ubuntu, with Amazon EC2 instances that I connect to when needed. I spin the instances up and down as I need them. It works wonderfully, and I can't go back.<p>Admittedly, the Chromebook does have its limitations compared to a Macbook Air. Ubuntu on it has its quirks, but I'm willing to deal with it and wait for issues to be ironed out. A Macbook Air would definitely not have such issues.<p>I usually do mobile app development, web development, data crunching in Python for my Masters, and I haven't run into any problems doing what I need to do. I love the portability and simplicity.<p>I'd seriously recommend it.<p><a href="http://www.xitijpatel.com/2012/12/16/google-chromebook-and-ubuntu" rel="nofollow">http://www.xitijpatel.com/2012/12/16/google-chromebook-and-u...</a>

I have been Macbook Pro based since April 2010. It's my first Mac. I got ~full specs at the time (1GB SATA non-SSD drive - no regrets there, I've needed the space; 2.3Ghz Core i7; 8GB 1333Mhz RAM).<p>I've taken the system through about 10 countries in 2 years. I don't really have a house, and I have to carry everything with me. (That includes a video camera, a heavy pro DSLR, chargers, etc.)<p>I do use VMWare, plus occasionally game, video edit, etc. and so have similar performance requirements.<p>Given the above, and that recently my partner bought a new Macbook Air (far cheaper), and we took both of them travelling around a few months of Indonesia, Thailand, etc., I think I am well informed to comment.<p>My advice would be this: Think very carefully about comfort and workflow, before money.<p>Comfort-wise, for me, having a large screen and keyboard are non-negotiable. The difference is huge, particularly if you want to use the thing instead of a desktop for any length of time (eg. multi-country mobility, like my situation).<p>Workflow-wise, it's ultimately all about your specific situation. In my situation, I don't have enough space to store all my raw images, VMs, video, etc. but have come to a good solution with a secondary small form-factor external USB3 drive I access from the Mac (via rsync over SSH and a Linux VM, no less! I don't trust non-ext3 filesystems after bad experiences! Some driver I found claiming ext* support on OSX never worked.). I've never had an SSD-is-primary-drive machine, so don't feel there is any issue with speed.<p>As for remote ... depends on the connection quality and reliability where you are planning to go.<p>Sounds to me like you could probably solve your build/test issues by queueing testing via your development process, eg. by syncing your new code only when online and using a remote (eg. EC2-hosted) continuous integration server which could probably resolve a lot of issues you never knew you had, as well as the ones you are looking at. That way you could use cloud windows boxes spun up automatically from platform-linked images, potentially bringing them up and down automatically with your CI server.<p>If you are worried about money, don't be. We forget how much time we spend in front of these things. It's far better to invest in good tools. Really. I mean, 60Mb/s fiber in Europe, don't worry about a few ms, or a few hundred dollars. Worry about your health.

I have asked myself the same question as I would like to upgrade my machine. I currently run a MBA 2011 with 4GB of RAM. It is by far my best computer purchase. When I'm at a desk, it's plugged into an external monitor. Until Mountain Lion, I never had a problem with RAM, but I've adjusted how I do things on my laptop to fix the issue. I wrote up a PrOACT and found that it came down to 1 point for me.<p>- Do I require the dedicated video card and is that video card worth $1000+ increased bill<p>So if you're only looking to do development, go for the MBA since it's better cost for use. The Retina doesn't matter if you're always plugged in like I am.<p>Your only question you should ask yourself is, do you either want to use multiple monitors which the MBA can not do or do you want to be able to play games that require the video card?<p>Latency to me is not a problem. I live in asia and there is internet everywhere. Would it really make that much of a difference for you?

I am using an early 2011 MPB. It was my first Mac (after using Debian for 4+ years). I needed it for my school work (using Adobe Photoshop was a must). I needed a computer I could easily carry (home to school and home to girlfriend's home, which is 700km from where I live).<p>I use my computer for web development, watching a few high resolution movies and playing to some humble bundle games. I didn't buy a MacBook Air because of the integrated graphic chip (some of my friends have one and using it with a 27' monitor made the MBA/MPB 13' really really hot, especially during the summer ; it was around 30/35°C in France). Plus I ended up doing my internship in a company where their core knowledge was working using WebGL. Anyone trying to use our product with a MBA/MBP 13' couldn't because of the integrated graphic.<p>I also tried to work directly on a server (for coding), it's really great but as soon as you don't have Internet (either you use your phone for the connection or you are stuck and you can't work) you are stuck. And I've been stuck more than I thought I will. I didn't know about mosh at the time and had also a few problems with connection/deconnection and that is really painfull when you are using a few ssh terminal at the same time.<p>As contingencies said, it's really about comfort, carrying one more kilo was not a problem for me and even if I could spare spending more money having the setup I needed and not being "stuck" when doing something is better than not spending a few euros.

Re portability with the Retina MacBookPro: I've had mine (15") for about 3 months now, and I have to say it's absolutely great.<p>The Air is very thin, and weighs in at 1.35Kg, but has a weak CPU and Intel graphics.<p>The rMBP is not that extremely thin, but it's amazingly thin as well, a lot thinner that the old MBPs and other laptops. It weighs only 2Kg which still makes it very light to carry around. I'd say that for portability, the new 15" rMBP is great. Light and small enough to carry but still powerful enough to work on. Given that it has a i7 CPU, GF 640 graphics card, 16GB RAM, a retina display, and almost the same battery life as the air, which is 6-7 hours.<p>You can host your VM's on a remote server if you like, but as far as choosing Air vs rMBP, the rMBP is an obvious winner, except if you mind the higher price tag.

I am in your exact same situation. What I am thinking to do is get a Macbook Air and spin up Amazon EC2 instances if I need more power. This way I only pay for what I use + I have a wide range of server instances I can use, from micro to xlarge (68GB RAM which costs ~$30 per hour).

I have just moved all my servers to hetzner a few days ago. I'm running them all on a Quad Core i7 with 32GB mem, it's an EX 4S. So far so good. Expect a day to get the server and make sure you order any extra ip's when you order the server otherwise you will have to wait a day for the ip. I needed one extra ip because i'm running vmware free esxi hypervisor and it doesn't route traffic to it's clients. So I have a virtualised firewall aswell it can be handy being able to vpn into your virtualised environments. I also installed an ubuntu desktop, working fine. I'm usually all about the terminal but the esxi is controlled via an xp which is running on my retina macbook pro in virtual box. (Esxi client is windows only).

You'd have much higher latency working on the remote VMs than on local VMs. You'd also be dependent on Internet connectivity and you'd have to rely on Hetzner's machines being available whenever you need to do your work. Shit does happen.

I have this set up and I love it. I didn't do this intentionally at first. I'm a PhD student, so I have a powerful (well, was powerful at the time of purchase) desktop in my office. I use to carry around a hulking laptop (desktop replacement, basically) until one day I got a grant to buy a Mac Air.<p>I've never looked back.<p>Thanks to git, SSH, screen and Dropbox, syncing is super easy.<p>Once in awhile, it is a bit annoying when I need to process some large files and I'm on a plane or something. Then the slowness of the Mac Air kinda shows. But otherwise, it's perfect. It's also ideal since I can push jobs to my desktop and use my Mac for personal stuff.

In my office we have been giving all dev's 13" full spec air's for about 2 years. Need to process a big data set etc? Do it on our EC2 setup. It works better and people don't tend to have as much stuff on there machines.

I have been doing this for years, no worries. Latency is rarely going to be an issue with remote desktop--you could get more than acceptable performance over a 56K modem line at MBA resolutions way back in ancient times. And depending on the Internet connection at the host performance may well be better than running locally because the data is moving over their big pipe and only the display is moving over your smaller pipe.<p>I would make sure to use virtualization software on my server that also runs on my laptop so I could easily grab a local copy of a VM to take with me on a flight, etc.

At work we all use the higher spec 13" air's - keeping our dev environment inside linux vm's that run locally.. I run a few windows vm's for front end testing but we do have a beautiful windows machine sat in the corner too - as long as I don't try and run everything at once its fine, with the benefit of having the lightweight machine to take around the place..<p>Do you always stay connected to the internet when you need to work / how much would it affect your productivity if you weren't able to access a remote server? I imagine the latency would get annoying, even if it were minor.

Could you not easily upgrade the RAM to 16gb on the W500? Disk upgrade to 512GB should also be doable. (My x220 has 16Gb/512Gb and it does well for similar vm based setup.) Or do you have an older model w500?

I'd prefer the Air or even the Pro (there's really not much difference in portability terms) and still work remotely. It's liberating to host everything on the cloud. You don't have to worry about your local setup failing, the VMs hogging resources and making your machine unusable (or destroying your battery).<p>Right now I'm using a Macbook Pro 2012 w/o the Retina. I do all my development on Linode servers, remotely. I get 6 hours of battery life and the machine is a pleasure to work on. I wouldn't go back to my old Windows laptop, where I used PuTTY to work.

I have the same sort of problem, and went with the MBPr. I need large VMs (6gb+ of ram) and travel a fair bit, so dragging around a big Dell was taking its toll. The MBPr has been great, the only limit being disk space, 512GB fill up quickly when each Windows image takes 40+ GBs. Also, the gorgeous screen, 6 months later, is now ghosting on me.<p>A colleague went with Air + VPN to his home lab, but that fails when your customer works "in a bunker" (i.e. heavy-handed firewalls and proxies, common in financial sectors).

I found this article really helpful when I realized all my work really revolved around my servers. I've got an iPad with a really nice Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and I love the fact that I can charge it overnight and use it all day (just like my cell phone). Of course, there are more limitations with my rig than you'd experience with a MacBook Air.<p><a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/swap-your-laptop-ipad-linode" rel="nofollow">http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/swap-your-laptop-ipad-li...</a>

The Air is a somewhat paradoxical machine in that it is extremely portable and therefore perfect for travel, which is when you often lose the data connection and therefore need more power to run VMs! You, however, don't have that problem, if indeed you are most often working from home. In the case you describe, definitely go for the Air, or wait a few months to see if the Air gets a retina screen. I have an air, and it is difficult to consider going back to anything even slightly bulkier.

Get the retina MBP. You won't have to think about setting up, backing up, connecting to, updating, or securing a remote server if you do. Unless you enjoy doing those things, you are better off saving that time and especially effort for other things like family time.<p>I get awful headaches using anything more reflective than the MBA display, so unfortunately Apple's retina notebooks are all unusable for me. It is something to consider if you are coming from a high quality matte display like a Thinkpad.

Assuming you will use the laptop for two years before selling it for 50% of the original price, the server will cost extra 1200 eur (24x50) during that period, making the Air + server option more expensive. Also, it's much more comfortable to have everything running on localhost. No network lag issues, no dependency on fast internet connection, less hassle, etc. Not to mention very nice 2880*1800 display.

A company I own rents virtual servers that run on Hetzner hardware. We had terrible trouble getting Xen or KVM to run correctly on their network and never got the networking to function correctly so we gave up and offered OpenVZ only. This was a year or two ago, perhaps things have changed though.<p>On the positive side Hetzner are an excellent host, unbeatable value and amazing support.

FWIW, I run multiple virtual machines (Windows 8, 7, and XP, Ubuntu, and more) on my 2012 MacBook Air 13". I'd run out of space fast using the internal SSD, so instead I have a USB 3 external HD that I run the virtual machines from. Now, I'm usually only running one virtual machine at a time, but really, it runs very nicely, far faster than I would have expected.

No apple store to check out the macbooks? I just ordered the rMBP, 2.6 16 256(best value I think) for $2499. The SSD is way to expensive to justify for me, my data can be on an external hd or server. They are light and slim enough for me. Movies and photos are amazing and its fast enough to load up Starcraft2 or other games when I want.

I'm in a similar situation. I commute 3 hours each day on mass transit and love the Air in those situations, but I do miss the processor power.<p>I happen to have a pretty beefy PC at home, so I just RDC into that for my Visual Studio and compiler needs (I think I'm one of about seven people who develop .NET on a Mac!)

Why not just upgrade the W500? It'll be far cheaper than going to Mac and renting out a server. For disk space you could get the SATA HDD bay for storage and memory is simple to upgrade on Thinkpads (and better it doesn't void your warranty, because Lenovo doesn't assume your an idiot).

Tangentially related :- I use a Lenovo with 16gig ram for light dev work running VMs', and I use a ExoPC running Win7 and Mouse with Borders for viewing documentation/stackoveflow, and use an Ipad as a second monitor.<p>Basically means I have a 3 screen portable setup which works quite well.

MB Air are too big and heavy these days. Go for a Samsung Series 9 or Chromebook, especially if you don't care about Retina. Certainly not the MBPro, they're incredibly heavy and overpriced.<p>I do basically what you're proposing here, with a lightweight ultrabook, and it works very well.

If you wanted mobility around the house while avoiding WAN latency and reliability issues, you could buy a server and keep it in your house, rather than renting it and accessing remotely. Then get the Air and use that to RDP, SSH, etc. to the server.

Seems like you could more or less test out the setup with your current machine but VMs on a remote server so you could get an idea of the latency and see how well it works for you.<p>It seems like a reasonable idea to me if you always have a fast connection.

If you want portability, get an 11". Maybe you think you need those extra 2", but I believe in time that you will find you are wrong, and never look back.

Linux Libvirt on the server, Linux libvirt on the Macbook Air. You can use SPICE to connect to the server VMs. All built in, no setup, all as easy as VMWare or the like would be. I'm using that with Cinnamon on Ubuntu 12.10 and I'm in bliss.<p>Also, I think you will be very very very hard pressed to find anyone who owns a Macbook air who would tell you to get anything else. People who don't own them underestimate them and they're not anywhere near as underpowered as people act like.