[blakehaswell]

I’ve been using a 11" Macbook Air (2011 model, 4GB of RAM) for the past 2 years as my primary dev machine and it hasn’t skipped a beat.

I’ve worked on everything from Spring projects to NodeJS projects, and I’ve used editors including Eclipse, WebStorm, and Sublime Text 2. I’m also a heavy Photoshop and Illustrator user.

Occasionally I have experienced problems where I’ve run out of physical memory while running Photoshop, Illustrator, WebStorm, and Chrome at the same time, but those problems have been very rare. Those problems have also been non-existent since switching from WebStorm to Sublime Text 2.

I would definitely recommend an Air as a dev machine, but get a memory upgrade if you can afford it.