<p>So, I was wondering would a MacBook Air for a CS student be fine. I don't watch to many movies, etc. Plus, I have an extra hard drive. I need something light on which I could instal windows office and do CS work like develop programs etc on Xcode.</p>
<p>Would the 11.6 inch MacBook Air be fine? It has 64GB Flash Storage and a 2GB ram, and it's 1.6 GHz Core i5</p>
<p>Or would you recommend something else? I need something very light and something that isn't slow or anything.</p>
<p>I’d recommend buying a Sony Vaio S Series Laptop, or a Z Series (if you don’t mind your optical drive being separate from the actual laptop). The Z series is even lighter than the macbook air and you can get up to an i7 2620M plus up to 1 tb of flash memory. The air is pretty sleek and everything but a puny 1.7 ghz dual core won’t do it for CS IMO. The S series is pretty light (3.8 LBS) with it’s optical frive attached to the laptop. Both are pretty damn expensive bu it’s worth it.</p>
<p>I’d recommend the 13-inch MBA. I think it’s a better combination of performance and size. The Z Series is hundreds of dollars more, and the S series is a pound heavier than the 13" Air.</p>
<p>Also, overachiever, you don’t need a computing powerhouse to do CS assignments. You can do most of the assignments remotely regardless.</p>
<p>^ Meh… I was just going based on the CS work my brother had to do when he was getting his Master, but I guess it’s different.</p>
<p>The Core i5 is hyper-threaded, so you will get a quad core essentially. I’d recommend the 13-inch MBA also since you should allocate 50 GB for Windows (once, I allocated 25 GB for Windows and it got filled up after a year with just Word, Excel, Visual C++, and SolidWorks installed… the security updates slowly eat up your HD space).</p>