[GabeRicard]

I have a 15" 2012 MBP Retina that still works amazingly well. But... I wanted to do side project work on the train ride to/from work and the MBP is just too big for my backpack and cumbersome to use if I'm sitting next to someone else.

I picked up a Chromebook so I'd have a smaller (11") device to work on. I did a bunch of research and ended up with an Acer C720-3404 (a specific model that has 4GB of RAM, when most only have 2GB, and has a legit Core i3 CPU instead of a Celeron, so it actually had great horsepower. And I managed to find one with an upgraded 128GB SSD for $150 on craigslist. I spent a bunch of time messing around with it and ended up with an EFI boot system, Clover bootloader, and a triple boot setup with Windows 10, Ubuntu 16.10 & Mac OS X El Capitan. Sounds great, but it has its downsides. Win10 has to run in some test mode so the custom drivers will work, OSX wifi is flakey and stops working periodically, Linux would randomly crash and I was never able to get the trackpad setup juuuuuuust right so I can use the smaller keyboard without my palms causing issues. I was able to get some work done with it, but eventually it turned into me spending more time maintaining the system than being productive.

So I'm selling the Chromebook and I bought a 2013 MacBook Air to replace it. I spent probably 4x as much on the Air, but it just works, I can triple boot it the same way if I want, and it has a Core i7 and 8GB of RAM, and the battery life is like 10+ hours. That and the overall quality is just better.

The Chromebook was fun to mess around with, but I'm more productive with a Mac.

[douche]

I just can't wrap my head around the idea of a 15" laptop being too big to fit in a backpack or work on comfortably. On the other hand, these tiny laptops that people wax poetically about seem comically small to me. In college, I had a 10" Asus eeePC that I picked up cheap to take to class, since my main computer was a beastly 17" HP, and there was no way in hell that that would balance on the tiny little flip-up desk arms on lecture auditorium seats. I couldn't physically fit both hands on the keyboard, and had to learn how to type with just my left hand. It was passable for typing a few notes and dicking around on the internet, but I cannot fathom trying to actually do work on it, simply because of the ergonomics of something that tiny.

Even going up to the 13" form-factor that appears to be all the rage these days, it's tough when I hold one up next to one of the 27" monitors attached to my desktop, and notice that it is only one quarter of the screen area. And I've got four of those arranged 2x2 at my desk.