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I have been Macbook Pro based since April 2010. It's my first Mac. I got ~full specs at the time (1GB SATA non-SSD drive - no regrets there, I've needed the space; 2.3Ghz Core i7; 8GB 1333Mhz RAM). I've taken the system through about 10 countries in 2 years. I don't really have a house, and I have to carry everything with me. (That includes a video camera, a heavy pro DSLR, chargers, etc.) I do use VMWare, plus occasionally game, video edit, etc. and so have similar performance requirements. Given the above, and that recently my partner bought a new Macbook Air (far cheaper), and we took both of them travelling around a few months of Indonesia, Thailand, etc., I think I am well informed to comment. My advice would be this: Think very carefully about comfort and workflow, before money. Comfort-wise, for me, having a large screen and keyboard are non-negotiable. The difference is huge, particularly if you want to use the thing instead of a desktop for any length of time (eg. multi-country mobility, like my situation). Workflow-wise, it's ultimately all about your specific situation. In my situation, I don't have enough space to store all my raw images, VMs, video, etc. but have come to a good solution with a secondary small form-factor external USB3 drive I access from the Mac (via rsync over SSH and a Linux VM, no less! I don't trust non-ext3 filesystems after bad experiences! Some driver I found claiming ext* support on OSX never worked.). I've never had an SSD-is-primary-drive machine, so don't feel there is any issue with speed. As for remote ... depends on the connection quality and reliability where you are planning to go. Sounds to me like you could probably solve your build/test issues by queueing testing via your development process, eg. by syncing your new code only when online and using a remote (eg. EC2-hosted) continuous integration server which could probably resolve a lot of issues you never knew you had, as well as the ones you are looking at. That way you could use cloud windows boxes spun up automatically from platform-linked images, potentially bringing them up and down automatically with your CI server. If you are worried about money, don't be. We forget how much time we spend in front of these things. It's far better to invest in good tools. Really. I mean, 60Mb/s fiber in Europe, don't worry about a few ms, or a few hundred dollars. Worry about your health. |