MacBook Air 2013 as a Java development machine

[Dawid Rutowicz]

Hi guys,

It's the highest time for me to upgrade my machine. I have been waiting for an Intel Haswell generation and the new procs had ranched out! :-)
I am masters student and working as well.

I would like to develop (continue) a web portal coded in Spring communicating to DB over Hibernate.

I will be working with:

Java

IDE (probably Eclipse)

DB server on VM (I prefer not to mess to much on home OS) or memory DB

websever (probably tomcat)

In addition, run a browser with youtube (flash), gmail, facebook simultaneously.

As a master student, I will be doing a thesis where I will be implementing a lot in AOP. Besides, on classes/labs basis I will be cooking with metrics and lot more.

The MBA chosen to consideration is:

Intel Core i7 1.7 GHz, Turbo Boost up to 3.3 GHz

8 GB LPDDR3 SDRAM 1600 MHz

128GB SSD

What I expect for the machine is a stability and no-lags. I am not a gamer person, I like to watch HD movies though.

As I compare competition machines there is no big hoo hoo. Only resolution differs but the machine will be connected to 24' display. The prices float in the same range.

What are your thoughts on that? I would like to ask you as experienced developers. Will the MBA satisfy me? I know you would recomment MBP but I am not buying it in US and the mentioned MBA costs almost $2k in regional MacStore.
Is it worth to buy this Mac or should I stop thinking about ultrabooks and consider traditional laptop with 4 cores proc and 16GB memory?

Thanks for your help.

[Bear Bibeault]

I think that system would have more than enough chops to run what you are planning.

For me, the problem would be screen real estate. I'd have a hard time developing on such a small screen. Heck, I'm hanging onto my ancient 17" MacBook Pro from yesteryear in order to keep all that screen real estate.

But as you are going to be routinely hooking it up to a larger external monitor, I think that would be a fine setup.