When comparing MacBook Air vs Samsung Notebook 9 Pro, the Slant community recommends Samsung Notebook 9 Pro for most people. In the question“What are the best laptops for programmers who travel/digital nomads?” Samsung Notebook 9 Pro is ranked 7th while MacBook Air is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Samsung Notebook 9 Pro is:
With a bit of preparation, such as turning off fastboot and making sure Bios are fully update, installing Linux is not that difficult. Once installed even the touchscreen works, as long as the latest Kernel is installed.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Solid build quality and elegant design
Macbook Air has a high quality all-aluminum body that looks great and is sturdy enough that worries of accidentally damaging are mostly alleviated. It has a robust lid, well-spaced back-lit keyboard and an excellent button-less trackpad.
Pro Great keyboard
The MBA has a well-spaced, back-lit keyboard with convex keys and placed in way that the resting arms on the sides of the trackpad is comfortable.
Pro Good battery life
The 11" model lasts up to 9 hours and the 13" model up to 12 hours. Great for programming on the go as you don't have to worry about the battery dying.
Pro Best-in-class trackpad
MBA has an excellent button-less muti-touch trackpad that's highly accurate and comfortable to use.
Pro OSX is developer-friendly
OSX is based on XNU (Darwin) kernel, it's certified Unix and arguably a lot more developer friendly than Windows. Development for Unix is native on OS X.
There's a large selection of great development tools available for OSX. The operating system itself comes bundled with a powerful terminal emulator, called Terminal. Additionally, Apple provides tools, like Xcode, an IDE that contains a comprehensive collection of tools for developing OSX and iOS software, for free.
Pro Plays nice with Linux
With a bit of preparation, such as turning off fastboot and making sure Bios are fully update, installing Linux is not that difficult. Once installed even the touchscreen works, as long as the latest Kernel is installed.
Pro Well spaced keyboard
Being that the device has a large body a full sized keyboard is able to fit without any compromises. While the device itself is shallow the keys have a good bit of travel to them.
Pro Beautiful design with great build quality
With a black aluminum body not only is the device a pleasure to look at but is also has a strong build quality.
Pro Very solid full metal case
Cons
Con Low resolution screen
Depending on the model, the MBA has either a 1366 x 768 or 1440 x 900 screen and that's behind the expected 1080p screens of most modern ultrabooks.
Con Trackpad sticks
While being large and mostly accurate the trackpad does stick some.