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As a developer, these are the things I care about:
- Battery life; if there's one thing which may very well be the deciding factor between Sputnik and the Macbook Air for my next on-the-go dev machine, this could be it
- Apple-style multitouch support throughout the UI (gestures, two-finger scroll, etc.); I haven't used GNOME/Unity with a multitouch trackpad, so I'm not sure how much this is already present
- Swappable keys in the keyboard (or, better yet, keymap as an order-time hardware configuration option); I personally use dvorak over qwerty, and if you'll find a disproportionate ratio of dvorak users in any group it'll be developers (keymaps are something no one really wants to fuss around with, and this is a real ly easy way to score brownie points with your target market; even those of us who use qwerty will respect the attention to detail)
- General snappiness (i.e. pretty much any modern hardware; even scaling back to a Core i5 would be fine if it significantly improved cost or battery life)
One exception, however: >=8 GB RAM would be awesome. I don't care about specs insofar as they don't get in the way (which CPU speed and disk space tend not to do), but I find myself *constantly* running into memory issues from tons of Chromium tabs / dev tools simultaneously open with anything less than 8 GB.
Sure, it isn't that difficult to keep track of memory and stay alert about closing things not in active use, manage browser sessions, etc; but all that is extra cognitive load which takes away (unnecessarily) from productivity.
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