MacBook Air 2018: A Good Secondary Development Machine

Original Post Date: Tuesday, December 18, 2018 at 5:14AM

When the updated MacBook Air was introduced about a month ago a lot of the tech blogs wrote it off as not powerful enough for professionals. I think this is bunk.

I'm an mobile developer for a living and was lacking a laptop for development. I have a iMac 5K at home for my heavy development lifting but needed something portable. The MacBook Air was a perfect fit. I upgraded the RAM to 16MB and the SSD to 512GB. This put it $100 less than the MacBook Pro 13inch but that laptop does not have TouchID. I use 1Password all the time and the integration with TouchID is a game changer.

XCode and Android studio run perfectly fine and this machine. I can compile big Swift projects w/o an issue. Android Kotlin based project suck a little more battery but run perfectly well. Heavy UI development or Instruments are still left for my 5k but for simply writing code the MacBook Air is a great secondary development machine.

The new MacBook Air is light and portable enough to bring anywhere. The Waterfield Vero Sleeve is a great purchase for protection and portability. It just feels so good in your hands. Don't listen to the tech blogs which are written by people who do not code for a living.

The MacBook Air makes a great secondary development machine for any mobile developer.