Not only is this pricing nucking futs (like what, 10x the cost of buying a decent tower and setting up tailscale), but in my experience (which admittedly includ

Not only is this pricing nucking futs (like what, 10x the cost of buying a decent tower and setting up tailscale), but in my experience (which admittedly includes only GitHub CodeSpaces, GitPod, Azure's thing, and Amazon Workspaces... but not this Google offering), when compared to doing this yourself these services are dog shit slow. The fastest of any of those 4 I tried — "16-core" with 32GB of RAM — is like several multiples slower than my aging commodity-hardware Linux tower with 11th-generation Core i9 11900K and 64GB RAM and medium-fast NVMe (older-generation but still 5GB/sec or so reads). I mean things that take 2 minutes on my self-managed "remote" box take 10-15 minutes on these hosted VMs. And that thing cost around $2000, years ago. I'm not talking crazy workflows, either. Sometimes I build a big open source project like Swift or the Deno runtime, but the speed differential is totally apparent even just building medium-sized web apps and doing 'npm install'. I completely endorse this general model of doing development on a centrally-located beefy machine (or perhaps set of purpose-specific VMs/containers hosted on that beefy machine), and making it available remotely to whatever device. (BTW if you have kids, this model works awesome for them, too, once they get old enough to start wanting their own computing environment.) But even if you are OK with the costs of these services, which are basically like buying a max-spec MacBook Pro every 2 years, the performance doesn't come close. And yeah, I haven't tried this specific new one, but I am confident it is in the same ballpark because otherwise they would be shouting, "OVER 10X FASTER THAN GITHUB CODESPACES!" but they are not.