I'm considering getting a 11" MacBook Air soon. The portability sounds great, as I have an old MacBook Pro 13" now and it's rather heavy.<p>The only concern, of course, is that it's <i>too small.</i> Seems like an external monitor would solve any issues, though. What are your experiences?
For me the limit is its dual-core-ness. I currently use a 13" Air as my main development machine and for <i>most</i> tasks it's fine. The resolution on the 11" is bearable, although I notice the difference. I also think the screen bezel is ugly at the 11" size.<p>When it comes to pushing out multiple VMs to simulate various real-life scenarios the 8G limit comes into play and it's not always sufficient. My earlier MBP w/ 16G was fine.<p>If I could have a 13" Retina Air with 16-32G I'd be a Very Happy Boy. As it is I suspect I'll be moving back to an MBP after the Broadwell shift and I can get 32G DDR4. Until then I likely won't make a change.
I'm totally blind so the small screen is not a problem for me. I use a 2013 air with the 1.7 GHZ processor, 8 gigs of ram, and a 256 gig SSD for development when booted into Windows. I find that it works well for most things but I do find my self going to my desktop if I am doing heavy database work or virtual machines which will be used heavily. The keyboard is decent but I find myself sometimes plugging in an external keyboard if I'm sitting at a desk and know I'm going to be typing for a while.