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Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

Combine Cloud9 with a $300 touchscreen Chromebook and that's a hell of an environment vs buying a $2000 Macbook.

Is it though? Eventually the ec2 costs will outstrip your savings on the macbook. $1500 a year ish for a reserved m4.large w/ 2 vCPU and 8G ram which seems about comparable. That math doesn't work unless you're buying a new macbook every 2 years.

edit: This bit is interesting though: If you’re running in AWS the auto-hibernate feature will stop your instance shortly after you stop using your IDE. This can be a huge cost savings over running a more permanent developer desktop.

So perhaps the cost is quite a bit lower.

You can also manually hibernate your instance once you are done with the work for the day. I also suspect you won't need anything like a m4.large for most dev environments but i see that you wanted some equivalent to a macbook pro, so that makes sense.

If you use this for your day job (and you don't maintain crazy hours...), you'll be running ~180 hours per month on average. That's $17.28/mo or $207.36/yr for an m5.large. You can save a few bucks with a t2.large, but I think < $20/mo is something most businesses can cover (again, assuming this is for your day job).

This assumes you do no work outside of that slim vertical, experimenting with different languages for others sorts of projects, etc.

But sure, if that is your life, or your very strict work life, I guess it can work fine. Would never be able to work for me since I tinker with so much random shit.

Between this and using Parsec for a remote gaming machine, I wonder if I'm wasting my money by buying a local gaming machine like it's 2006.

Remote gaming just still isn't there yet imo. Anything multiplayer has enough latency/unreliability issues as it is. Even gaming over WiFi as opposed to a wired connections will create all kinds of problems. I wouldn't want to introduce yet another variable into that.

But how does it compare to, say, Codenvy.io + a $300 touchscreen Chromebook?

Cloud9 isn't the only cloud dev environment out there.

Apparently Code Envy is about to be snatched up by RedHat! All these companies are being bought up!

https://blog.codenvy.com/redhat-acquires-codenvy-c84e1202a04...

I was thinking this would be pretty nice combined with a 12.9 inch iPad Pro.

Better with Tablet like iPad or Droid yes as you get more bang for your buck

I tested (I’m sitting in Reinvent keynote with a 10” iPad Pro with Smart Keyboard) and it gets stuck on connecting.

Twitter suggests they’re having load issues. Should have prewarmed those laps balancers!

Or used the new Network Load Balancer (where prewarming is supposedly unnecessary).

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