Need advice on MBA 13" for software development and Lightroom

[halccw]

I once had a plastic white Macbook 6 years ago, but it was stolen... Impressed by the qualities of Apple notebooks and the Macintosh OS, now I have saved some money and would love to own a Macbook again

The Macbook will be my only computer. It's mainly used for software development, running Windows/Linux virtual machine, editing photos in Adobe Lightroom, and watching blu-ray format movies. No gaming or Photoshop.

In terms of budget, my first choice is Macbook Air 13" with i5-CPU, 8G-RAM and 128G-SSD. However I have some concerns. How much space is left besides OSX, VMware, and Windows 7(64b)? How does MBA perform when running a parallel Windows or Adobe Lightroom?

Thanks for your advice.

 

[Weehira]

Space left

Well all depends of how much space you set the VM's to use and Lightroom catalogs can be rather big if you use smartpreviews.
I'm on a 13" MBA i7 8GB 256GB SSD and have around 180GB left after lightroom/photoshop and other software, Vm's ( Win 7 and mint)
A simple thing to do is having the Vm's on a external drive, you won't feel any speed issues een from USB2
The only thing is I woud go after the i7 cpu instead og i5