I used the Air for two years as my primary machine both for development and regular office use. I had absolutely no problems with it, and it kept up very well w

I used the Air for two years as my primary machine both for development and regular office use. I had absolutely no problems with it, and it kept up very well with all of my tools (VMWare, IntelliJ, cli watchers, Xcode, mobile dev etc). And this was the previous generation. I tried using MBP couple times, but always kept on going back to the Air for the form factor. Finally, two months ago I lost my Air and replaced it with a retina MBP machine. During my regular activities, I cannot tell any difference in performance. Sometimes archives get processed quicker and batch jobs get done faster, but this is less than 5% of my work so I don't care about it at all. What did make the difference is the retina screen - I love it enough to keep on using the bulkier MBP (regardless of how close they are on paper, you will feel the difference in your hands). But I will switch to a retina Air with 16GB as soon at it comes out.