i personally recommend a macbook pro with an i5 or better, why? the cores, the macbook pro/air 13" use the outdated core 2 duo which supplies at best 2 cores,

i personally recommend a macbook pro with an i5 or better, why? the cores, the macbook pro/air 13" use the outdated core 2 duo which supplies at best 2 cores, the i5 and i7 have 4. from a memory perspective, you'll only get 4 GB at best with an mba, with the pros you can go to 8 GB. this is great for running not just virtualization, but also if you're like me and you have 20 things open and running at the same time. i dev in jquery + python + a mysql backend on fedora 14 running on vmware fusion. it's fine on my macbook pro 13 (2.66 GHz/2 cores/8GB Memory). highly recommend getting an SSD and maxing out the memory. my only complaint is the number of cores, wish i could have more cores. in terms of being able to dev on an mba, it's totally possible, it's not like you're compiling code. so it really comes down to how much memory and how responsive you need the machine to be. also if weight plays a role in your decision making.