Need Help

I need a new laptop mainly for Android Development and I am thinking of buying Macbook Air 2017.

Can you suggest me if it will work fine or should I look for other laptops.

And can you suggest some good laptops to buy in India.

BTW this will be my first Mac.

I think that if you don't need MacOS for development purpose, you should not buy a MacBook (way too expensive IMO). That being said, they sure are pretty well made
I don't know many good alternative but I often see some Lenovo being recommended.

ThinkPad

@ThatDude Not now but was gonna try my hands on iOS apps and I was leaning towards Air because of pricing of Rs 56000. XPS 13 is Rs 88000.

ThinkPad.

But don't buy anything else from Lenovo.

Indian market kinda sucks when it comes to laptops. Most of the laptops with SSDs are pretty expensive.

@ThatDude But i heard configuring Hackintosh is pretty difficult and doesn't perform as good.

if your planning on doing iOS apps you need a Mac. Don’t know about Android. Macs are well built and run for years and years. also you can boot to windows if needs be.

Android dev?
Go thinkpad with tons of ram and decent processor... it sucks to have low ram if u use that 😕

@shandaar About the Hackintosh-Thing:
You are a Dev. You will figure it out.
Isn't our whole job only about getting things to work, that originally shouldn't?

Think about it that way:
The Macbook Air comes with Dualcore i5 1.6GHz, 4GB RAM and 64 GB Flash

Just comparing Specs now:
One of the Notebooks with known good Hackintosh-Support would be the Dell Inspiron 15 7559, which offers Quadcore i7 3GHz, 8-16GB RAM, 256GB SSD + optional HDD. You can easily dualboot to windows after setting up everything correctly and even use the additional Nvidia Graphics Card (which Apple doesn't have and don't support in OS X) in Windows/Linux.
The base model costs less than the Air but has much better specs.

If the form factor isn't your main reason for the Air, hackintoshing for iOS development is a considerable option.

There are easy to follow Guides for different Laptops.
Look here to check for support before buying:
https://tonymacx86.com/forums/...

Also the Android Studio is usable but more like a torture on low RAM devices like the Air.
If you are writing something more like "WebApps" in a Framework to install them as an Android App, it's OK. (although in that case testing with Chrome would be an option, and RAM, again, comes in handy)
But real Android Development, including Compiling everything and preferably using the Android Studio... Well... It works... If you got some Time.

@Anaeijon Even with 8GB of RAM android studio will be creating problem on Air?

@notcool what good is a nice camera if the processor has only two cores, there's not sufficient RAM for Android Studio and well the storage is also fairly limited. So yeah, you get a nice camera maybe, but honestly, do you care about the camera or about specs related to your development?

Note: i have no idea about cameras, so no idea if it even is a good camera ;)

As others already pointed out, thinkpad.

I'm generally not an Apple fan, but if you're on a budget you could also consider a second hand MacBook. If there's one thing The Cult is good for, it's supplying the market with 2 year old hardware because the new shiny thing is in stores.

Consider that an Air is a bit underpowered as a tradeoff to size/weight, which is usually fine for webdev, but when building apps using Gradle it might get very annoying.

Zenbook, XPS and ThinkPad are awesome for development as well.

If mobility isn't important, consider that a homebuilt workstation results in a cheaper machine that can't be beat by any laptop in terms of speed, upgradability and screen real estate. I recently built two Ryzen 7 PCs for the price of one single MacBook, and I only write code at home and at the office...

get the thinkpad t430, you can get it for less than 200$ then get a cheap ssd, some extra ram and put linux on there. In the end youll have a solid laptop thats similar in speed to the current ones. I would not get a new laptop now since next year you'll get double the cores for the same price.

Practically everyone on here will have a different answer, you’ll end up totally confused. Write a list of requirements in order of priority and find the system that suits. If you are asking specifically about macbook air, then you need advice from devs who use it, that would seem logical.

I'd also get a ThinkPad, compared to many Ultrabooks you can also easily repair or upgrade it.

Android Studio is a pretty bloated piece of software and it definitely isn't fun if your hardware can't handle it. As long as you don't need Mac OS I'd look for performance first.

Lenovo X1 Carbon 4th Generation. Thank me later.

@shandaar sry, No, 8GB RAM should be fine.
I've read somewhere that the Air only has 4GB of RAM.
The Processor is OK, but doesn't compare in that price class. You usually will find this one in Devices priced about the half or a third of the Macbook Air.

@Anaeijon Macbook Air 2017 has 8 GB of RAM but i5 5th gen