[Godel_unicode]

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.

[vacri]

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.