I know I’m kinda derailing this a bit, but I played with a new Air a bunch yesterday at the Apple Store when picking up my new iPad. Quite honestly, I’m questioning its existence other than to provide a system with the “Air” moniker just to fulfill established corporate purchase lists. Maybe to appeal to the existing Air customer base who don’t want to go “Pro”. It barely has a price advantage and absolutely no performance advantage over a 13” Pro and only shaves 1/4 lb of weight by being thinner at the front, having 2 less ports, and maybe gives up to 2 hours more battery under super-ideal conditions. Hmm...
I wanted to like it a lot more than I do. I was hoping more of something like the the 12” MacBook but with two TB3 ports and the 3/4” larger screen in the same exact form factor.
I’m still tempted to pick one up as I could use something smaller than my 15” Pro for mobile XCode stuff that I’m doing a lot of these days. Which kills me because the iPad Pro is more than perfect enough for that, if only we had a real development environment and not just Playgrounds. I’m sure that is coming... Actually I know it is, I’ve heard credible murmurings, but WWDC still feels like an eternity away and it may not happen in 2019.
I think for general app development use, the Air will be great. Using it for iOS emulation it will struggle, and a MacBook Pro will be much better. And yet, emulation is still clunky on a maxed out 15” Pro if any graphics or performance code is involved anyway. So I don’t tend to spend much time in an emulator, just go direct to the device.
16GB would be my recommendation. Sure 8GB is probably fine for a lot of projects, but 16GB won’t leave you in a bind if you’re profiling, debugging, etc.. Yes, a lot of that depends on what all you’re doing and the new Air is really a light duty system so for most people who are fine with the Air as their daily driver, 8GB is probably all they’ll need.
