3 ms·

I'd like to hear more about your experience working on the 11", when you're away from the external display. Are you cramped because of the resolution? Keyboard

by jpb0104 13y ago

I'd like to hear more about your experience working on the 11", when you're away from the external display. Are you cramped because of the resolution? Keyboard and trackpad?

Alphasite_ 13y ago
I think the screen and trackpad are the same size for all MacBooks.
- gambiting 13y ago
  The trackpad on the 11" is smaller.
lazerwalker 13y ago
I use an 11" Air as my full-time machine. The keyboard (and, I believe, the trackpad) are the same size as the 13". I rarely find myself cramped by the resolution. A little bit more vertical space would be nice, but I can comfortably fit two 80-column text buffers side-by-side or do light image editing work without any trouble. Easily my favorite computer I've ever owned.
Synaesthesia 13y ago
I actually sold my 13" Retina MBP and bought an 11" Air and I'm happier. Hard to believe but the portability counts for a lot.
joshontheweb 13y ago
Up until recently, the 11" air had a higher resolution than the 13" macbook pros so you didn't feel cramped as far as resolution went. With expose it is easy to move around between windows and that helps a lot. If I'm doing a photoshop session I really like to be on the big display but most of the time I don't really notice when I'm without it. I work from home a lot and don't have a display there. It's fine.
LeafyGreenbriar 13y ago
I've used the Air as a full-time development machine in the past. It can be great if it fits how you write code. I write code in emacs or vim, so I would run that in a fullscreen terminal window under tmux, which allowed me to quickly switch between my editor and various zsh prompts. I'd also have Chrome open in another fullscreen window, and use the four finger swipe gesture to navigate between the two. For other apps I'd use hotkey combinations and Alfred to do as much navigation as possible to minimize using the cursor. The biggest downside of the setup was when I needed to use a web page or video for reference while coding, which I basically couldn't do. I know a lot of coders like to have two monitors up so they can have a browser visible at the same time they are working in their editor, and none of them could understand how I could use the 11 for my main machine. The resolution was a bit constrained for working in an IDE with a lot of information in frames, so it isn't idea, at least for me, of using IntelliJ or similar programs. And that beings said, what really ended up killing it for me, is that the screen resolution is fairly high for the display size, or at least I thought so. Basically, type wound up being just a little smaller than I was comfortable with, and making it larger did leave me with too little space on the screen.

by jpb0104 13y ago

I'd like to hear more about your experience working on the 11", when you're away from the external display. Are you cramped because of the resolution? Keyboard and trackpad?

Alphasite_ 13y ago

I think the screen and trackpad are the same size for all MacBooks.

gambiting 13y ago
The trackpad on the 11" is smaller.

lazerwalker 13y ago

I use an 11" Air as my full-time machine. The keyboard (and, I believe, the trackpad) are the same size as the 13". I rarely find myself cramped by the resolution. A little bit more vertical space would be nice, but I can comfortably fit two 80-column text buffers side-by-side or do light image editing work without any trouble. Easily my favorite computer I've ever owned.

Synaesthesia 13y ago

I actually sold my 13" Retina MBP and bought an 11" Air and I'm happier. Hard to believe but the portability counts for a lot.

joshontheweb 13y ago

Up until recently, the 11" air had a higher resolution than the 13" macbook pros so you didn't feel cramped as far as resolution went. With expose it is easy to move around between windows and that helps a lot. If I'm doing a photoshop session I really like to be on the big display but most of the time I don't really notice when I'm without it. I work from home a lot and don't have a display there. It's fine.

LeafyGreenbriar 13y ago

I've used the Air as a full-time development machine in the past. It can be great if it fits how you write code. I write code in emacs or vim, so I would run that in a fullscreen terminal window under tmux, which allowed me to quickly switch between my editor and various zsh prompts. I'd also have Chrome open in another fullscreen window, and use the four finger swipe gesture to navigate between the two. For other apps I'd use hotkey combinations and Alfred to do as much navigation as possible to minimize using the cursor. The biggest downside of the setup was when I needed to use a web page or video for reference while coding, which I basically couldn't do. I know a lot of coders like to have two monitors up so they can have a browser visible at the same time they are working in their editor, and none of them could understand how I could use the 11 for my main machine. The resolution was a bit constrained for working in an IDE with a lot of information in frames, so it isn't idea, at least for me, of using IntelliJ or similar programs. And that beings said, what really ended up killing it for me, is that the screen resolution is fairly high for the display size, or at least I thought so. Basically, type wound up being just a little smaller than I was comfortable with, and making it larger did leave me with too little space on the screen.