Husband, Father, Vermonter, Developer
Husband, Father, Vermonter, Developer
I've owned the MacBook Air for three weeks now. I'm coming from a 14" MacBook Pro, so in many ways it might be fair to call this move a "downgrade". The MacBook Air is slower in multi-core tasks. It has a worse screen, missing the brightness and fast refresh of the Pro. It has fewer ports. It has worse speakers. It has less RAM (but we'll get back to that in a moment). What does the Air give me? Well, AIRiness. For me, that's a compelling tradeoff.
I'm a software developer doing full-stack web development and cloud-native services, so really what I need is RAM and speed in single core tasks, like JavaScript execution.
A better screen? - No, not really. It's nice to have but the work I'm doing is not in video, photography or UI design work. The screen on the Air is more than nice enough for my needs. Truth be told, I don't even have enough of an eye to notice the difference most of the time.
Multi-core speed? - Not required for my work. I'm not compiling native code. Sometimes I'm even doing my programming on remote VMs like an EC2 instance, so I'm leveraging the power of the server anyway, not my own device.
Ports? - I have a USB-C connection to my external monitor, which at once powers the device and stands in for HDMI. Otherwise, I virtually never use the ports on my devices these days.
Speakers? - Great speakers are a bonus, but the speakers on the Air are honestly not that bad. Or perhaps my ear just isn't good enough to hear where it falls flat. Certainly for a Google Meet or Zoom chat they're more than adequate. In any event, I often use my noise canceling headphones during work and the quality of the speakers there is what truly matters.
What about RAM though? - Heavy use of Docker, sometimes dozens of Chrome tabs and many open apps makes my RAM usage much higher than the average user. 8 or 16GB of RAM would be nearly unusable for me. Fortunately, for the first time ever the MacBook Air is offering 24GB of RAM -- an unusual number, given Apple tends to offer RAM in "doubled" tiers like 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. As it happens, 24 is a nearly perfect number for my work and I've not hit swap once yet. On a very intense day it's possible I might exceed 24GB RAM, but given how rare this would be, I'm not going to sweat it. SSDs are unbelievably fast these days.
I don't commute and I rarely travel, so it may seem like I could get away with a desktop or heavy laptop. And let's be honest, the 14" MacBook Pro shouldn't even qualify as a heavy laptop. The thing is essentially an "ultrabook", thinner and lighter than far less powerful competitors. What I do find though is that I get antsy sitting at my desk, though it's a standing one. I love to bounce around the house: working in bed, working on the couch, working in my cozy chair before the fire...
The Air is so damn light that it invites being picked up and used as a laptop. I simply love roaming around the house with it.
It reminds me so much of an even more mobile computer that I'd owned once upon a time, the 12" Macbook. That was an even more portable (arguably more beautiful) machine, but it ran an Intel chip so slow that I sometimes wanted to throw the thing at the wall. Oh, and it had 16GB of RAM, which even then was an issue. By contrast, this Air is an absolute powerhouse, running circles around most Intel-based machines. And as mentioned earlier, it has enough RAM and a fast enough SSD that you'd be hard pressed to critique anything about its performance.
So do I miss my 14" MacBook Pro -- a laptop I've called the best laptop I've ever owned? Not at all. This machine can claim the 👑.