Chromebook can make a surprisingly sweet machine for a developer

First thing you might be missing: there are probably a pile of folks on hacker news who don't have money. Students. People who have invested their life savings in their startup. People who work part time and see the world in the rest of their time. People who are spending their money on making sure their mum gets treatment for cancer. For these folks, getting the most out of the kit they can afford is important. And yes, thats a condescending statement aimed at you, but its not more condescending than "why don't you drop a couple grand on this problem?"

Second thing you might be missing: computers have marched forward in spec, yet most of us don't need tons of power in any dimension of the spec. My cheap chromebook ($200 or so) has 2G of ram. I went though uni with about of order of magnitude less ram, and was happy. The 16G ssd it ships with is sufficient for anything that isn't movies, music or photos. The ssd probably has more iops than 2005 era hard drives :). So the chromebook is low powered compared to the desktops of today, but its pretty powerful compared, to, for example, the computers google or facebook used to get off the ground.

Third thing: cloud compute. If I find myself needing thousands of hours of cpu time, I can get that on EC2 or similar. And its cheaper for everyone to rent cpu time when needed on a server in a well cooled warehouse somewhere where power is cheap, rather than have idle cpus connected up to city power grids.

I own a cheap chromebook (and I'm amused by you saying cheap in a negative way :)), and its fine for what it is. Its slim. Its not as sexy* as your mother, but hey. It has a debian chroot with all the normal tools on it. I don't worry about it being damaged or lost as much as I would if it was 5x as expensive. If I spent the money on a macbook air, I'd be buying a machine to run chrome and a terminal window, and all I'd be getting for my extra 800 dollars would be a nicer screen and track pad.

* I do wonder about people who describe computers as sexy.

I've recently done the same thing, although coming from the perspective of "you can have my MacBook Air when you pry it from my cold dead hands". It turns out that when all of your development has to happen on your Linux desktop anyway, which laptop you use matters a whole lot less.

For people who live remotely, Chrome OS is perfectly serviceable. I think you have to already be in that remote mindset for it to be a comfortable switch, though.

The objections I usually see (including those in this thread) relate to what the laptop can't do locally, and a lot of those objections are perfectly legitimate. There's a lot these little boxes can't do easily with the tools available today (which again, isn't to say these things aren't possible, just that they're not there yet), and for people who need those things making such a switch isn't going to be possible.

The only upside you seem to have there is the hardware itself, and that updating whichever OS (you don't specify) was harder before.

It's not like I don't have ssh here on my Ubuntu machine (similar model Thinkpad to yours), I don't see why you are trying to sell that as an upside. Indeed I have iPython in shell mode and a local copy of vim customized to my needs, and I have that as well as a server I can connect to at any time with all my sessions. Sometimes I might want to do an experiment locally rather than on a server though.

I can not only edit video (is anyone going to upload HD over the network to edit it on YouTube's editor?) , I can edit images, use my Wacom tablet, program things locally, I can record audio into Audacity and edit and change it. I can run LaTeX and actually work on academic documents. I can apt-get programs to resize many images, encode music or do just about anything. I can use R or python to generate graphs and save them locally rather than copy them from a server save or some crazy cloud save. On smaller data problems I can have a spreadsheet open for GUI editing in Libre Office and be saving to csv for a program to ingest after quick edits. Peripherals work without having to program an entirely new driver. It's a full desktop and it's fully featured, you can use it in a cloud-oriented way if you so choose as well so there doesn't seem to be any advantage to the Chromebooks other than this supposedly easier updating and nice sounding hardware.

The problem here is people are trying to sell an unfinished consumer OS as being good for developers or power users who already have powerfully polished desktop operating systems that are consumer oriented AND developer oriented as soon as you lift up the hood. In comparison the Chromebook simply doesn't stack up. The article was trying to push boot time as a feature for example, it just leads me to believe he hasn't installed Ubuntu in two years (or more actually).

I'm a power user so I need to work on images, video and audio, I need to be able to generate academic papers. I need to have OpenCV running locally on webcam feeds for testing things. I need advanced networking features from command line tools on localhost. It's all fine and dandy for them to come up with cut down device like a tablet with a keyboard, but after my experience of them turning off tethering on a Nexus device I am just not going to jump on board with anything until it's actually got more features and those features are actually not going to disappear at the whim of some advertising dollar driven decision. I don't think they'll ever be able to guarantee that properly. That OS sounds like it's years away from being remotely usable for a power user who's across a number of domains.

Also, last I checked, Secure Shell relies on an NaCl plugin incompatible with the Samsung ARM Chromebook.

My use-case is as a supplement to a heavier machine for travel. I love my 15" macbook pro, but I got tired of lugging it around Nepal, and I was always worried about it getting stolen or damaged.

I'd love to split my two computing needs: - 1 machine that's heavy and does everything. Maybe a desktop; maybe a 17" laptop that I only move between work and home. - 1 machine that's light, disposable, and does 90% of what I need to do. It fits in a traveller's backpack and I'm not heartbroken if it gets destroyed.

Right now I try to meet those needs somewhere in the middle with a medium-weight macbook pro, but it's definitely a compromise. I'd love to have both worlds.