[gtklocker]

I'd prefer the Air or even the Pro (there's really not much difference in portability terms) and still work remotely. It's liberating to host everything on the cloud. You don't have to worry about your local setup failing, the VMs hogging resources and making your machine unusable (or destroying your battery).

Right now I'm using a Macbook Pro 2012 w/o the Retina. I do all my development on Linode servers, remotely. I get 6 hours of battery life and the machine is a pleasure to work on. I wouldn't go back to my old Windows laptop, where I used PuTTY to work.

[jfb]

Don't undersell the value of having a monstrously fast local machine; I much prefer working on big datasets locally, as my machine is significantly faster than nearly any EC2 node. And, it's portable and has a fantastic screen. And works in the car or behind a spotty connection.