Are airs suited for development? The only thing I can think of is that maybe the 13" screen will be too small since the specs on the new models are quite impressive.
From home I'll be working on a desktop anyway, but this will be something to bring to hackernests and school.
I'm sure I could run Postgres locally on the Air and the SSD would keep up without breaking a sweat but I like to share dev databases between my machines by running them on Dotcloud.
The only other thing really worth considering is RAM. If you are a web developer I suspect this isn't too much of an issue. I find that running xcode and eclipse together produces some swapping.
Surprisingly, I noticed a ton of airs at strange loop earlier this week, so they seem to be doing ok with hacker crowd.
Like pashields I'm crunched for RAM so go on Newegg and buy the max you can put in that machine.
If I'm working at a remote location for a week or more, I'll drag along my 27" apple monitor and set it up and use an external keyboard and mouse... currently set up that way, in fact.
I doubt I'll ever go back to a larger laptop, I love the air.
I've been using the first generation 11.6" Air which replaced a unibody 15". Other than FreeBSD and Linux servers racked elsewhere, this Air is my "everything" machine.
My tricks for the smaller screen:
Keep windows overlapping with just enough visible underneath to indicate status, and of course set the Dock to auto-hide. e.g., Mail window is on far right with little more than the scroll bar showing, so I can still see whether the horizontal cursor/bar is at bottom of that window or not, which indicates new mail. Of course, when I'm deep into code-mode, I don't want the distraction of email anyway until I come up to breathe, so it's one less distraction.
Likewise for Terminal. I have less than one row of text visible underneath Emacs, VMware and browsers. This is just enough to see if a background compilation or other task is still running. Again, like email-- one less distraction unless and until I want to be aware of it.
In Emacs, I'm using my own build of 24.0.50 with 185x46 character resolution and make heavy use of 'split-window-horizontally instead of 'split-window-vertically which I used predominantly on earlier machines since 1989.
The screen size only becomes a problem if you're doing stuff like Xcode development with the iPhone simulator open, because there just isn't a lot of space. In that case I much prefer to have a big monitor, like 27".
The only annoyance I've dealt with is that the Storyboard feature in XCode is practically made for a large screen device.
I didn't notice a loss in productivity as I was afraid of, and I really love the portability. I brought it to Southeast Asia for 5 months this year - really liked that it didn't weigh too much!
