Programming

The MBA is more than powerful enough for any kind of programming that you're likely to do, unless you're John Carmack Junior. You won't have any problems.

 

No problems, you can do all the programming you want. More than enough.

 

FWIW, I've got a late 2009 MacBook Air which I use for programming. Solid state drives are a big help in doing builds.

 

Yep you'll be fine. I take some programming modules at university (my degree is pure maths though) and it's all I've ever needed.

In terms of power as someone else stated it will be more than up to the task of most programming tasks. And anything that you can't run through OSX (of which there aren't many these days) you can always use a virtual machine to Win7 or something.

 

I program php, java, rails, grails, iOS apps, and android apps on an Air. Have used both an 11" core duo and the 13" sandy bridge. Both were great.

Used adobe cs5 for some of the related graphics work. Also fine.

Used MySQL sever via MAMP. Not slow at all.

Netbeans for java could be a little slow but that was most likely Netbeans, not Mac.

I actually preferred the 11" core duo air because it was quieter.

 

Re: your first question, the MBA's have "real" chips in them, not some crippled Atom-like CPU in them, so I would think for most of your programming needs, you would be fine.

Re: your second question, are you concerned about warranty? or about avoiding customs taxes/tariffs? I would think you would be able to get away with it, I just don't know if the warranty would be honored in the UK if anything went wrong.

Are you ok with a US keyboard?