| For me, there are three potential types of applications: a. Those that run fine on the Chromebook. b. Those that would run fine on a larger laptop or desktop, but not on the Chromebook. c. Those that need to be deployed to some sort of server. I don't write anything that falls under (b). If a program is expecting to be run on 10 disks, or with 48gb of RAM, or across a cluster of 12 nodes, it's highly unlikely that my personal dev machine will work out, so (c) will be used. That's also how I'd want to test any production-level deployment. The gap between (a) and (b) is actually quite small. The Samsung 3 Chromebook specs are a bit better than almost every smartphone, so pretty much any Android app could be placed under (a). Pretty much any unit test for a (c) app fits under (a). Compiles would be faster with a beefier dev machine, but the fact that the Chromebook comes with an SSD already places it ahead of the default corporate machine (at least in my experience - perhaps employees get SSDs in their Dells nowadays). Certainly a MB Air has a faster CPU, but the difference isn't that dramatic for development purposes. As one counterexample, I'll point out that my wife spends most of her work day in Photoshop and Illustrator. Even if those apps ran on Linux, my guess is that the resource needs would still make an Air or a MB Pro a much better choice. |
The SSD in the Chomebook for instance gets about 64 MB/s sequential read, 17 MB/s sequential write, 4 MB/s random 4k read and 1 MB/s random 4k write.
Which in practice is probably better than a 5400 RPM HD, but there's still a magnitude of difference from a most laptop SSDs.