[pandakar]

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.

[snooks]

The 13" retina would be a perfect solution if you could get it with more than 8GB of ram. But since people are suggesting Airs with that much ram I would certainly take the retina 13" instead. Actually smaller but a little heavier than the Air but with that fantastic screen.

[pretoriusB]

>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!

If you loose the connection you're screwed anyway, except if you work in some long term isolated part of a system.

Else, you have no access to the repo for other people's commits, no mail or IM contant to see what to work on etc, no way to check documentation/Stack Overflow/etc, no way to connect and make changes to the deployment servers, etc.

But it's not like people don't have access to the network on travels, anyway. In most hotels, coffee-houses etc you can get a wifi connection easily, and that's even in places like major African cities.

[pandakar]

Yeah, I was referring to those long haul airplane rides more than anything else.