Macbook Air 11"?

[xVeinx]

Hello all,
I've been using my Mac Mini since January and have loved it! OS X has a lot of perks that I can appreciate, particularly since it's unix based and integrates well with the type of work I do. I'm considering a Macbook Air as my current laptop has reached 4 years and seems to be having hardware issues (Its a Dell 1225 that has lasted better than I expected). For the most part I need something mobile I can carry around at uni, primarily for coding, generating figures for publication using illustrator, the occasional TV episode, etc. I realize the screen size isn't huge, but I'll be using either terminal with vi or maybe Komodo edit, nothing sophisticated. My past experience with these tasks ussually sees less than 4 Gb of ram used for the most part. Still haven't figured out how OS X manages memory, but I expect a certain amount of swap here and there which shouldn't be a huge issue. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

 

[GGJstudios]

My past experience with these tasks ussually sees less than 4 Gb of ram used for the most part. Still haven't figured out how OS X manages memory, but I expect a certain amount of swap here and there which shouldn't be a huge issue.

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

If you do have page outs under normal use with 4GB of RAM, the performance degradation won't be quite as significant with a SSD as it would with a HDD. It will still be slower than if you had no page outs, but that may be acceptable to some users.

 

[xVeinx]

So, I realized that I would need at least a little more space and real estate. I have the option of going for the 13" Pro, 13" air, or a 15" Pro at $1300 (2011, but brand new). The 15" would be nice, as I can always put extra cores to ues, even if it's only in testing code on example datasets, and working on OpenCL code. It would likely become my dedicated machine for most everything at home, school, work, etc.

Thanks!