DEV Community

Discussion on: Learning How to Write Go REST APIs on a Pixelbook: Day 1

Collapse
 
bradtaniguchi profile image
Brad

I use the i7 Pixelbook for work every now and then for TypeScript based web projects and found there is one part of the laptop that cuts down on my productivity the most, and its the CPU.

Here are the specs for the CPU's between the i5 and i7 models of the Pixelbook.

The base performance of the two are 1.20ghz and 1.30ghz respectively. Boosted the two CPU's get up to 3.30ghz and 3.60ghz, which sounds fine, except they are heavily throttled once the laptop gets hot, meaning less performance. Throw in the fact everything you do is in a VM, in a container the Pixelbook CPU isn't very fast when it comes to CPU heavy tasks. I could be wrong as I'm not a big hardware guy, but my Pixelbook just bogs down once I start working on larger projects.

Don't get me wrong I love my Pixelbook (my favorite laptop no doubt), but due to the CPU limitations it is far from the "be-all-end all" laptop I wanted it to be. It can still do everything my other laptop can do (which is an old i5 HP running Linux) just like 30% slower, and around 100% slower than my desktops.

I hope your experience working with a goLang based project is better than mine in terms of developer experience! If you don't mind slower load times, the Pixelbook will get it done (especially the i7 version) just don't expect it to run circles around a Macbook Pro 😄

Collapse
 
jaysonjphillips profile image
Jayson J. Phillips

Thanks for the comment!

I have no expectation at all that this will replace my MBP for full dev and/or day to day work. However, there's times I just want to create some proof of concepts and/or self study code (or personal items), where I don't necessarily need the full MBP on my back all day.

To your point, the processor is a low-power dual-core Core i7, it's essentially the Macbook 12-inch with more RAM and a different screen. But it is also sooooo much lighter on my back lol.