@Eric: I wouldn't choose an Air for a serious development machine-- you tend to want as much juice as you can reasonably have on a dev machine if you plan to keep using it for a few years, and frankly the value for money on a 15" MacBook Pro is much higher-- for only $200 more, you get 2 more inches of screen, which is significant for a developer, as well as more juice, more, faster storage, and upgradeable memory. That said, depending on your needs, it certainly is powerful enough to *work* (I used a 12" Powerbook for development for a couple years), you just might be grumbling at the choice a little bit down the road.
@Jesper: A nice thought, but developers should give frequency disk writes zero more consideration than they do now-- there's simply no meaningful reason to do so. No user with an SSD disk will worry about whether a particular piece of software is contributing more or less to its long-term failure, and no app developer would ever be able to measure their impact on such a failure in any meaningful way, so there's no reason to spend a moment of development time worrying about it. If an SSD was really so "fragile" as to require special care in write frequency, it would never be qualified for inclusion in a mainstream consumer computer by a major manufacturer. Also, the people who are able to measure any such effects (Apple hardware qual or OS team) are the only real ones who are able to take meaningful mitigating steps, like building magic block migration into the filesystem.
by Ben — Jan 19
@Jesper: A nice thought, but developers should give frequency disk writes zero more consideration than they do now-- there's simply no meaningful reason to do so. No user with an SSD disk will worry about whether a particular piece of software is contributing more or less to its long-term failure, and no app developer would ever be able to measure their impact on such a failure in any meaningful way, so there's no reason to spend a moment of development time worrying about it. If an SSD was really so "fragile" as to require special care in write frequency, it would never be qualified for inclusion in a mainstream consumer computer by a major manufacturer. Also, the people who are able to measure any such effects (Apple hardware qual or OS team) are the only real ones who are able to take meaningful mitigating steps, like building magic block migration into the filesystem.