Over at Signal vs Noise, DHH just wrote about how his MacBook AIR could be his only machine, and talks about powerful enough to all his development work.  In fact, he’s using it so much, his MacBook Pro is gathering dust.

I’ve been in the camp of small, lightweight dev machines for a couple years now.  My current development machine is a three year old Dell 700m.  Mine is a single core 1.6 ghz with 1.5 megs of RAM.  It’s lightweight and small.  It’s has a 12 inch screen, but I often have it hooked up to a 20" monitor.  Even three years later I still get nearly 3 hours of battery life.   I do hate the fact that it has a small keyboard, but I’ve gotten used to it.  The best part, I paid $785 for it, including shipping and tax (though not including the 1.5 gigs of RAM).

I love the small form factor of this laptop.  I work in places I never could with a desktop, nor would I enjoy as much with a 15" laptop.  I watch movies in cramped airplane seats (try that with a 15.4 inch monitor) and while riding trains down the North East Corridor.  I start off my morning working in my office tethered to the large monitor, then I move to the couch where I slouch with the laptop on my stomach; out to the kitchen for coffee and NPR; up to the roof deck to bronze the skin; downstairs to the couch where I plug it in while the battery charges and CNN is rambles in the background; down the street for an afternoon pickup-me-up coffee.  The small form laptop is liberating in ways I never thought of back in the days when I was always coding and working at a desk.

I often carry the small form laptop with one hand, lid open, while other hand carries coffee, papers, magazine, books, etc…

I have a powerful desktop, but I don’t use it for work.  Initially, I did.  But when I started developing with Adobe tools, my laptop was turned into my dev machine, so I could go to the library and work in the air-conditioning.   With the latest release of Flex Builder 3, I still don’t need a faster computer.

I haven’t tried running Visual Studio 2008 on it.  I haven’t run a full-fledged Microsoft development stack (IIS, SqlServer, Visual Studio, etc.) on my old dell, nor done any development within a Virtual PC/VMWware VM (which is how I develop on the desktop, using VMWare images running different environments).  Nor, am I happy with Photoshop performance (I only edit photos, no web graphics work).  Which is why Ill be getting a new laptop, probably something of the 13.3 inch size, and one of the new Penryn 2.5 processors.  Ideally with 256 graphics (can’t really find any 13.3" computer right now with that, though, I don’t game and probably don’t need it).  In my previous post I mentioned my wants in a laptop, I’ve only recently narrowed it down to having to be powerful AND a small form factor.

While I don’t agree with all the Apple fans touting the AIR as being so massively innovative — even Dell had offerings back in 2003 (300m, x300) and before (can’t remember the model) that had sub three-pound laptops with detachable DVD drives for the jet-setting executive — I will agree about how liberating a small computer is.  And for most people, even many developers, the lightweight machine offers plenty of horsepower for building innovative software.