While this is nice, I could never use something with such high latency for editing code or interactive sessions. You've just added latency all over the place. Delayed input and output plus networking across the world.
Remove the extra step going from Phone to Chromecast (plenty of phones have HDMI OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client) and this a great solution with minimal latency. Anything remotely comparable in the 80s/90s would have been totally out of reach on a student budget.
Serious (I hope!) question: how does one run the SSH client on the Chromecast? Are you proposing installing Linux on the Chromecast, or is this something available out of the box?
Totally agree with your point about HDMI, I overlooked it because my phone doesn't support it.
You can cast your whole screen from Android or a Chrome tab to Chromecast (now called Google Cast). That includes any SSH client you have running there. (There are SSH clients for both Chrome and Android)
If you look at my GGP comment, you'll see that mirroring to the Chromecast is what I initially suggested. I was specifically asking about the statement "OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client".
I suggested this because I've tried it, and it works well if you have no privileged reference frame to which you're comparing it. A new Precision with a Xeon and 32GB of ECC RAM is nice. Not necessary for the vast majority of development jobs.
Compared with what? If you're stacking it up against what Western first-world developers use (macbook with an SSD and more RAM than my first dev box had HDD) then of course you're correct. That's also emphatically not the use case I was addressing.
Stop arguing from extremes. A $300 notebook is better to code on than that phone-tv-remote-machine-via-ssh setup. For a start, you can use an IDE that isn't terminal-bound. You can also code at a desk (or wherever) instead of tied to wherever your TV is, at watching-the-TV angles and postures. You're also not going to lose your session and potentially your unsaved edits because the network interrupts. Yes, you could use tmux or similar, but now you've changed the standard keyset (and screwed normal scrollback), and are increasing the requirements to entry.
A cheap notebook is also a much lower barrier to entry - in order to have your own droplet, you need to know how to set up a cloud machine and connect to it properly. That's not trivial knowledge to a newbie (nor is it relevent, unless they're coding for servers), even though us old hands can do it in our sleep. Similarly, you need a way to pay for for the online subscription.
That seems far more Heath-Robinson than even the old days of plugging a computer into the TV and saving programs on tape.
Mind you, I learnt to program BASIC before I had reliable access to a computer too, so I programmed on paper. I wouldn't reccomend it for any but the most determined student.