iPad-ification of Development

Since I started my career as professional software developer my motto towards new laptops was bigger, faster, larger until now. Since I started working with iPads I started to think maybe lighter, quicker, longer maybe better afterall and so I went ahead and bought an 13-inch Mac Air on Black Friday.
Initially a new laptop had to be:

• bigger meaning the screen real estate had to be bigger so that I could view more code without scrolling
• faster meaning faster CPUs to just get work done faster
• larger meaning more harddisk space to store all my projects and other documents data.

Now having a Mac Pro at the office with a 30-inch monitor I have no need for a big laptop and when I am on the road I rarely do hardcore development that requires a big screen and being on an airplane or inside a car the size of the laptop makes it cumbersome to code anyhow. So my priorities shifted to:

• lighter meaning having a lightweight laptop is easier to transport and I can work with it everywhere
• quicker meaning the laptop is always on like an iPad. My 17-inch laptop with its SSD boot drive is close to it but I have some hickups with the setup from time to time.
• longer meaning battery life. Again the 17-inch laptop is close but not quite there.

So I already started my transition to the Air a while ago with my MacBook Pro but now I want to have it in a nice little package that I can take everywhere without breaking my back or being afraid it might slip.
The need for more CPU power went away some time ago because I rarely max out CPUs and if I really need to deal with movies then I’ll use my Mac Pro instead.
Finally the need for large harddisks also became somewhat mute with external drives that are quick and big. Lately I never had to manage many huge projects and so the only reason I need a lot of disk space is because I have many projects around for reference which I rarely use so an external drive would do just fine.

So now I think I am ready to develop on an iPad like device rather than carry around a “Schlepptop”.

– Andy