Not too long ago, I would have struggled to find a good reason to buy an uber-powerful Chromebook with oodles of RAM and a high-end notebook CPU inside. Chrome OS just doesn't need it because it was built from the ground up to work with machines that have very modest specs. That was Google's secret weapon — build really cheap laptops that worked well so it can have your attention on every screen. It worked.

Chromebooks started as affordable laptops for everyone but now come in beefier versions, too.

The inclusion of packaged Linux applications for Chrome has changed that. Now, if you're a developer who uses a Linux desktop to write, compile, and test code, a Chromebook is an excellent choice. You'll appreciate a model with a new-ish Intel CPU and 8 or even 16 GB of RAM when it comes to doing all that, and when you're not being productive, you have the same entertainment options through the web and Google Play that every Chromebook has. It's a pretty sweet setup. But there's still one piece of the puzzle missing that would make a Chromebook even better: a high-end GPU.

A good GPU does more than make games look pretty.

I'm going to remind myself to not assume two things, and realize that not everyone likes to play games on a computer and not everyone understands what a graphics adapter does. A high-end GPU is beneficial even when you're not playing games because it's chock full of processing cores that can be harnessed to do "other" computing. These cores are fast, and if they are on a fast bus, they may even be better at doing some operations that the "regular" CPU in a computer is. Software like Adobe Premiere needs a lot of processing power to encode HD video without producing any artifacts, and it was designed to use GPU cores to take much of the load for the low-level computing. Other software can do the same, and a good graphics adapter with fast compute cores can be used in a lot of ways that aren't related to playing games.