That's a good guess ... but I still think there's a bit of hyperbole going on. I'd think a gigantor-laptop would be similar enough to an ultrabook that the kid would figure it out. If I recast the question of 'what it was' to 'what is that hunk-of-junk looking laptop?', then I guess I could believe it.
On that topic ... many of the chunky plastic boxes are actually great machines. We have a choice from a few machines at work ... and almost no engineers choose an ultrabook. While ultrabooks are good for some things (watching videos, basic productivity like word, small excel workbooks, etc.), I wouldn't want to compile an operating system on one. I have a gigantic brick of a 'laptop' at work (I think it's a Precision M6700), and I wouldn't trade it for anything. It's nice to be able to slap it on and off a dock, to be able to connect it to four monitors without any janky USB video cards, and to be able to install tons of RAM.
Not only that but it implies that a young person was an expert on what was derigueur technology and not. It's a pretty shallow assertion and hard to take the article seriously after that.
Even the number of developers who compile an operating system on any regular basis is extremely small. For me, developing software is much less resource intensive than a light web browsing session.
On that topic ... many of the chunky plastic boxes are actually great machines. We have a choice from a few machines at work ... and almost no engineers choose an ultrabook. While ultrabooks are good for some things (watching videos, basic productivity like word, small excel workbooks, etc.), I wouldn't want to compile an operating system on one. I have a gigantic brick of a 'laptop' at work (I think it's a Precision M6700), and I wouldn't trade it for anything. It's nice to be able to slap it on and off a dock, to be able to connect it to four monitors without any janky USB video cards, and to be able to install tons of RAM.