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It’s an Acer spin 13 and not a Samsung, but the 16G price seems to be in the same 700$ range. For the Macbook Air, the 16G version starts at 1079$ with educati

It’s an Acer spin 13 and not a Samsung, but the 16G price seems to be in the same 700$ range. For the Macbook Air, the 16G version starts at 1079$ with education discount so roughly 1.5 more expensive (they explicitely choose the 16G version of the ACER, so the RAM shouldn’t be ignored IMO) The thinkpad X13 at 16G of RAM is around 1380$ on amazon [0], so twice as much. I don’t know the Acer spin 13, but if the screen is as good as Samsung’s one, it is well worth the price, especially as you usually get more battery life, and the chrome OS + android + linux mix is actually good. There are still rough edges, but the good parts largely outweigh those. [0](https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Notebook/dp/B089GVNT9Q/ref=sr_1_4?crid=32SCL4DDYOI37&dchild=1&keywords=thinkpad+x13&qid=1623628437&sprefix=thinkpad+x13%2Caps%2C323&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Noteb...)

johndoe0815 5y ago
Oops, Acer, correct (that was also the price I looked up), thanks for the correction. The 16 GB version of the Macbook Air is more expensive, but I wonder how much more RAM a Chromebook needs for similar tasks since most of the software runs in Chrome instead of native? I don't know US Thinkpad prices in detail, but you can buy the 16 GB RAM/512 GB SSD Thinkpad X13 AMD (no OS) for 1025 Eur (edu discount) including 19% VAT in Germany (https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-amd-campus.html https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-a...). This makes 861 Eur before tax (US$1042 at current conversion rates). Of course, in the end it's all a matter of taste and use case and I'm happy to see more variety in the personal computing market.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  For the RAM use, I also think a 8Gb M1 MBA would be fine for most people, including the OP if they stay within the confine of the OS. Now, in CS we're one of the edge cases where booting VMs and parallel systems is part of the deal. In the Chromebook configuration it's actually 3 systems running at the same time so more RAM has a direct impact on performance. (point taken on the Thinkpad price, I also think if we settle on a refurbished Chromebook, we could so the same for the Thinkpad and perhaps get it a bit lower)
  - johndoe0815 5y ago
    The increased complexity and possibly missing familiarity with the system running inside the VM has led me to abandon VMs for the OS and compiler construction courses I teach. Instead, we make sure that all programming exercises work on Linux, MacOS and WSL. My OS course covers operating systems from a system call perspective (POSIX, processes, synchronization and the usual things), but doesn't include kernel/device driver development, so we only had to cope with small differences in syscall behavior here. Supporting Linux/WSL and macOS was a bit more problematic for the compiler backend exercise due to subtle differences in the supported assembler syntax and linker behavior between Linux and macOS as well as some students who might already own an M1 Mac. Luckily, Rosetta happily executes the x86 binaries my students created using the macOS x86 crossassembler and -linker, so that turned out to be not a problem (I was hoping that a student would build an Aarch64 backend, but that didn't happen). None of my students seems to own a Pinebook or MNT Reform, so Linux/Arm was not a problem this year.
bdefore 5y ago
As a web application engineer, I've been very happy with my Acer Spin 13 8GB version. I hit the RAM ceiling too frequently to regularly use the Linux VM on this device for work. But then I discovered I could run code-server (https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server) on my Manjaro desktop gaming PC and it's become a perfect match. I get VSCode in-browser of ChromeOS on a cheap light thin client with a great touchpad and 3:2 screen. The battery lasts forever since I'm not running anything intensive directly on it. And I get more compute resources than any laptop could offer. A bit surprised I don't read more people taking this path.

johndoe0815 5y ago

Oops, Acer, correct (that was also the price I looked up), thanks for the correction. The 16 GB version of the Macbook Air is more expensive, but I wonder how much more RAM a Chromebook needs for similar tasks since most of the software runs in Chrome instead of native? I don't know US Thinkpad prices in detail, but you can buy the 16 GB RAM/512 GB SSD Thinkpad X13 AMD (no OS) for 1025 Eur (edu discount) including 19% VAT in Germany (https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-amd-campus.html https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-a...). This makes 861 Eur before tax (US$1042 at current conversion rates). Of course, in the end it's all a matter of taste and use case and I'm happy to see more variety in the personal computing market.

makeitdouble 5y ago
For the RAM use, I also think a 8Gb M1 MBA would be fine for most people, including the OP if they stay within the confine of the OS. Now, in CS we're one of the edge cases where booting VMs and parallel systems is part of the deal. In the Chromebook configuration it's actually 3 systems running at the same time so more RAM has a direct impact on performance. (point taken on the Thinkpad price, I also think if we settle on a refurbished Chromebook, we could so the same for the Thinkpad and perhaps get it a bit lower)
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  The increased complexity and possibly missing familiarity with the system running inside the VM has led me to abandon VMs for the OS and compiler construction courses I teach. Instead, we make sure that all programming exercises work on Linux, MacOS and WSL. My OS course covers operating systems from a system call perspective (POSIX, processes, synchronization and the usual things), but doesn't include kernel/device driver development, so we only had to cope with small differences in syscall behavior here. Supporting Linux/WSL and macOS was a bit more problematic for the compiler backend exercise due to subtle differences in the supported assembler syntax and linker behavior between Linux and macOS as well as some students who might already own an M1 Mac. Luckily, Rosetta happily executes the x86 binaries my students created using the macOS x86 crossassembler and -linker, so that turned out to be not a problem (I was hoping that a student would build an Aarch64 backend, but that didn't happen). None of my students seems to own a Pinebook or MNT Reform, so Linux/Arm was not a problem this year.

bdefore 5y ago

As a web application engineer, I've been very happy with my Acer Spin 13 8GB version. I hit the RAM ceiling too frequently to regularly use the Linux VM on this device for work. But then I discovered I could run code-server (https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server) on my Manjaro desktop gaming PC and it's become a perfect match. I get VSCode in-browser of ChromeOS on a cheap light thin client with a great touchpad and 3:2 screen. The battery lasts forever since I'm not running anything intensive directly on it. And I get more compute resources than any laptop could offer. A bit surprised I don't read more people taking this path.