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.
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.