[aperture]

Woah, this is the kind of developing book I'd like: 6 hrs battery life IPS viewing display (without 1080p!) Mirousb universal charging cable 11 inch portability, weighing only 2lbs.

I have the acer c7 chromebook, and am really fustrated I can't simply trade it in for this chromebook. It really is one of the most appealing deals.

HN has also recently been talking about crouton, which I found very usable.

The biggest issues I see in this is 2.0 usb and that non-celeron processor.

For anybody considering developing on a chromebook, this looks like one of the most efficient chromebooks for you. A shame it doens't have a celeron though...

(Side note. I await installation for that IPS onto the acer. I may not be able to turn in the acer c7 for the hp, but if I can get ahold of that 11 inch IPS, I'm game for that :)

[trsohmers]

Why would you want an Intel chip in here? Would you rather get worse performance with half of the battery life? The only reason I can imagine is for installing linux and having the endless number of x86 precompiled applications. Even if that is the case, Ubuntu's ARM repositories have grown tremendously and ARM support is getting significantly better every kernel release. Plus, anything that isn't precompiled, you can always build yourself.

[sspiff]

To be fair, battery life on Intel's Haswell i3's is comparable and performance is much better. As much as I like ARM rising up to the challenge of the high-end Intel monopoly, they're not even close yet (though getting closer every year).

[aperture]

That's precisely it: for developing 32 bit applications.

As it stands, I have many computers that could benefit from me programming a 32 bit application, but only my rpi could benefit (and my cell phone, I suppose) with the ARM builds.

32 bit is also helpful for me because I have some 32-bit IDE (like the naobot from Aldebaran IDE). It is simply easier for me to develop and configure.

[trsohmers]

You want to develop 32 bit applications? Well I would imagine you would want to develop them for (and why not on) the most widely used 32 bit ISA out there... ARM. ARM has had a 32-bit ISA and hardware using it since 1995, and is now moving to 64-bit with Aarch64. Thankfully, they are doing it a hell of a lot better than how Intel managed the transition back in ~2004-2006 with x86-64, even though they are almost 10 years late to the party. But by all means ARM is 32 bit.

Obviously you meant x86 every time you said 32 bit in your reply. While it is pretty pointless to get into a religious war over processor architectures, I think it should be noted that the base compiling tools such as GCC and now more advanced/cutting edge ones like LLVM/Clang have started to give developers platform independence with cross compiling. As long as the libraries used have support for whatever you want to compile to (and almost all current packages and major libraries have ARM support), you can cross compile to x86 and vice versa. While I'm not a Stallman level FOSS advocate, I do love the fact that having as many open components to software allows this application portability to be a lot easier.

[sspiff]

Both Intel and ARM can work well in 32-bit, I don't see your point. On the contrary, if you're so hung up on the word size of your processor, ARM is a better fit than x86, since the latter is often running a 64-bit OS these days.

Are you mixing 32-bit and x86 in your comment?

[andrewcooke]

are you aware of the asus-1015? i got one recently, and it runs opensuse linux fine, has a celeron chip (appears to support virtualization, though i haven't tried yet; is missing some SIMD instructions that make matrix math slower), and similar size and screen to this (but it's fatter and plastic). i installed a 60GB ssd (comes with spinning disk; disassembly is somewhat painful; seems to fix any issue with the limited 2GB memory). not sure what the battery life is, but i wouldn't be surprised if it were close to 6 hours if you're not doing much heavy computing.