Could you not easily upgrade the RAM to 16gb on the W500? Disk upgrade to 512GB should also be doable. (My x220 has 16Gb/512Gb and it does well for similar vm based setup.) Or do you have an older model w500?
Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
#32The Air is a somewhat paradoxical machine in that it is extremely portable and therefore perfect for travel, which is when you often lose the data connection and therefore need more power to run VMs! You, however, don't have that problem, if indeed you are most often working from home. In the case you describe, definitely go for the Air, or wait a few months to see if the Air gets a retina screen. I have an air, and…
> The Air is a somewhat paradoxical machine in that it is extremely portable and therefore perfect for travel, which is when you often lose the data connection and therefore need more power to run VMs! If you loose the connection you're screwed anyway, except if you work in some long term isolated part of a system. Else, you have no access to the repo for other people's commits, no mail or IM contant to see what to w…
Yeah, I was referring to those long haul airplane rides more than anything else.
Re: Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
#33I'd prefer the Air or even the Pro (there's really not much difference in portability terms) and still work remotely. It's liberating to host everything on the cloud. You don't have to worry about your local setup failing, the VMs hogging resources and making your machine unusable (or destroying your battery). Right now I'm using a Macbook Pro 2012 w/o the Retina. I do all my development on Linode servers, remotely.…
Don't undersell the value of having a monstrously fast local machine; I much prefer working on big datasets locally, as my machine is significantly faster than nearly any EC2 node. And, it's portable and has a fantastic screen. And works in the car or behind a spotty connection.
Re: Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
#34I'm in a similar situation. I commute 3 hours each day on mass transit and love the Air in those situations, but I do miss the processor power.
I happen to have a pretty beefy PC at home, so I just RDC into that for my Visual Studio and compiler needs (I think I'm one of about seven people who develop .NET on a Mac!)
Re: Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
#35Could you not easily upgrade the RAM to 16gb on the W500? Disk upgrade to 512GB should also be doable. (My x220 has 16Gb/512Gb and it does well for similar vm based setup.) Or do you have an older model w500?
No, the W500 is limited to 8GB. The W510 can take 16GB and the W520+ 32GB
Re: Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
#36I'm in a similar situation. I commute 3 hours each day on mass transit and love the Air in those situations, but I do miss the processor power. I happen to have a pretty beefy PC at home, so I just RDC into that for my Visual Studio and compiler needs (I think I'm one of about seven people who develop .NET on a Mac!)
During what activities do you miss processor power on the Air? or is it just a general lack of responsiveness when booting, opening apps etc. and what is your processor?
Re: Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
#37I have just moved all my servers to hetzner a few days ago. I'm running them all on a Quad Core i7 with 32GB mem, it's an EX 4S. So far so good. Expect a day to get the server and make sure you order any extra ip's when you order the server otherwise you will have to wait a day for the ip. I needed one extra ip because i'm running vmware free esxi hypervisor and it doesn't route traffic to it's clients. So I have a virtualised firewall aswell it can be handy being able to vpn into your virtualised environments. I also installed an ubuntu desktop, working fine. I'm usually all about the terminal but the esxi is controlled via an xp which is running on my retina macbook pro in virtual box. (Esxi client is windows only).
Re: Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
#38In terms of latency, I've found that http://mosh.mit.edu/ pretty much delivers on its promises.
very cool
Re: Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
#39I'm going to jump in with my own solution. I recently moved over to using a Google Chromebook running Ubuntu, with Amazon EC2 instances that I connect to when needed. I spin the instances up and down as I need them. It works wonderfully, and I can't go back.
Admittedly, the Chromebook does have its limitations compared to a Macbook Air. Ubuntu on it has its quirks, but I'm willing to deal with it and wait for issues to be ironed out. A Macbook Air would definitely not have such issues.
I usually do mobile app development, web development, data crunching in Python for my Masters, and I haven't run into any problems doing what I need to do. I love the portability and simplicity.
I'd seriously recommend it.
http://www.xitijpatel.com/2012/12/16/google-chromebook-and-u...
Re: Ask HN: Macbook Air + Remote Server = Macbook Pro?
#40In terms of latency, I've found that http://mosh.mit.edu/ pretty much delivers on its promises.
Thanks for this! Seems to offer exactly the solution I need to solve my issues with woeking on EC2 instances.