The MBA is an absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs. I use it (MBA 15" M3) with a large complex TypeScript code base, and it is fast and amazing at 24GB of ram or more.

PS. The biggest speedup I got this past year (10x) was switching to native TypeScript (tsgo) and native linting (biome or oxlint).

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ajross 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs

Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box. The news here isn't "The M5 Air is a disappointment", it's "Laptops are commoditized and boring".

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jimbokun 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As a developer my quality of work life improved radically when they let me have a Mac instead of the Windows laptop I was using.

	▲	ajross 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Were you 3x as productive though? That's the analysis "they" tend to be doing. I don't even use windows (beyond gaming). The Jedi and I are just off on the ends of the bell curve pointing and the stupid numbers on the stupid price tag.

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bhouston 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a Windows-based developer from 1996 to 2015 and then Linux from 2015 to 2020, I can say that my dev experience is immeasurably better using a Mac.

The ranking is MacOS >> Linux >> Windows. The Apple ecosystem is expensive but worth it if you can afford it (iPhone + Watch + iPad + AirPods + Mac.)

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davio 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

$350 windows box probably isn't silent like the MBA

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lenerdenator 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box

Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?

	▲	horsawlarway 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I mean... it really doesn't matter. There are only a couple of relatively niche spaces where things like cpu performance are really the bottleneck right now. Hell - RPi 5 is perfectly fine for a huge range of development tasks. The 8gb version is very reasonable $125. Can you find things that these boxes can't do? Absolutely. Do most developers do those things? ehhhh probably not. Especially not in the webdev space. Would I still pick a nice machine if given the chance? Sure, I have cash to burn and I like having nice laptops (although not Apple...). But part of the "AI craze" is that hardware genuinely is commoditized, and manufacturers really, REALLY wanted a new differentiating factor to sell people more laptops. There's not much reason to upgrade, especially if the old machine was a decent machine at time of purchase. I have 8 year old dell XPS laptops that do just fine for modern dev.
	▲	ajross 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks? You can run docker in WSL better than you can on a Mac. You can run Linux natively on that box, too. "Stacks" is sort of ambiguous (my world is embedded junk, and the answer for using a mac with these oddball USB flashers and whatnot is pretty much "Just No, LOL"), but to claim that the mac is more broadly capable in these spaces when it is clearly less is.... odd. Macs are popular among the SV set, so macs are strong in whatever the SV set thinks is important (thus "I bought a Mac Mini for OpenClaw!"). And everything else runs on $350 windows garbage.

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packetlost 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's a bit slow, but still workable for Rust too. I prefer doing my daily work on a much more powerful 9955HX though.

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LoganDark 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Makes sense; according to Geekbench, 9955XX has about a 25% lead in multi-core over the base M4, and about a 5% lead in multi-core over the base M5. And more cores, so better for parallel Rust compilation.

	▲	packetlost 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'm comparing it to my M2 laptop, but in practice the 9955HX is substantially faster than even the M4 Pro I have in my Mac Mini, about 30%~ or so in wall clock time for Rust compilation.