The Macbook Air wasn't in any way intended for developers, though. All the people I knew buying Airs (even first gen) were the frequent travelers and types of people who do loads of work involving email, text documents, and slideshows. Nothing that required heavy processing, but work that involves being out of your desk and having to haul your work with you.

A lightweight PC small enough to slip in a folder was what they wanted.

The Macbook Pro was generally for more of the processing-intensive work and development side. Recently I've been seeing/hearing more and more dissatisfaction from that crowd.

It wasn't a powerhouse, but it was (the second generation one) the first successful "thin" laptop that made reasonable compromises so that it could be used a development machine.

In an era of remote servers and web scripting languages, not every developer needs a full-blown workstation.

I agree it wasn't indended for developers, but it ended up being adopted by many of them.

I used a 2013 Air with maxed specs as a dev machine for a while and still use it for web browsing and while traveling rather than lug around my more expensive MBP. With an i7, it's a very capable machine with great battery life.

Doing front end development, it was more than powerful enough for anything I had to throw at it.

> In an era of remote servers and web scripting languages, not every developer needs a full-blown workstation.

I haven't really found that to be the case, especially these days with "modern" frontend tooling, like Babel/Webpack/etc, static analyzers like ESLint/Flow/Typescript, and the various types of frontend testing. Every bit of performance helps.

You can debate whether all of that is necessary, but the reality is many companies use them.

The Apple's MBA11 was a fantastic device, but they stopped improving it and Dell came out with the XPS13. It is a similar form factor, has a bigger display, and runs Linux.