Chromebooks are the only small, portable, sub $500 PCs that don't completely suck. No wonder they sell. Everyone else is trying to charge $800+ even though laptops are perceived as something that should be cheap because they have a high risk of being stolen, getting damaged, or quickly going obsolete. It's like Google understood what the Netbook wanted to be, while everyone else dreamed of being Apple (without the least bit of ability to actually be Apple).
I feel like the Chromebook is actually a better experience than a laptop.
As a programmer, I honestly only use 2 windows: browser and shell. Running crouton to create chroot Ubuntu "images" I can have my normal full (text-based) dev environment, and alt-tab back and forth with the browser. Honestly it feels easier to use than Ubuntu - I don't use any of the builtin Google services (e.g. Drive), but they manage to stay out of the way.
It's pretty cheap, looks pretty reasonable, and comes in at a pretty low weight. The screen's not the greatest, but I'm not doing anything where that matters. So all in all a great dev machine.
Only caveat for me is that Dropbox doesn't have an installable app for ARM. I need to find something else that does a good job of seamlessly syncing my workspaces and NFS, rsync, etc don't fit as nicely as Dropbox.
What are you actually building that will run on this hardware? Are are you ssh'ing into a different machine?
I just can't see it possible to run anything that relies on the weight of the JVM or relies on external apps (Redis, etc). What web app can live without some sort of a data store (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc)? Let's not even get into if you need to compile anything. (Even if you're not working in C, compilation is sometimes necessary with gems/npm/etc)
The default answer seems to be just ssh into a dev machine, using the Chromebook as a dumb terminal. While it works, that destroys a classic workflow used by many, relies on Internet access, and adds additional cost (especially if you're a consultant). Even a cheap VPS adds at least $300 a year in cost.
Am I incorrect about running a full dev environment on the Chromebook? I'd love to hear others' experiences.
For me, there are three potential types of applications:
a. Those that run fine on the Chromebook.
b. Those that would run fine on a larger laptop or desktop, but not on the Chromebook.
c. Those that need to be deployed to some sort of server.
I don't write anything that falls under (b). If a program is expecting to be run on 10 disks, or with 48gb of RAM, or across a cluster of 12 nodes, it's highly unlikely that my personal dev machine will work out, so (c) will be used. That's also how I'd want to test any production-level deployment.
The gap between (a) and (b) is actually quite small. The Samsung 3 Chromebook specs are a bit better than almost every smartphone, so pretty much any Android app could be placed under (a). Pretty much any unit test for a (c) app fits under (a).
Compiles would be faster with a beefier dev machine, but the fact that the Chromebook comes with an SSD already places it ahead of the default corporate machine (at least in my experience - perhaps employees get SSDs in their Dells nowadays). Certainly a MB Air has a faster CPU, but the difference isn't that dramatic for development purposes.
As one counterexample, I'll point out that my wife spends most of her work day in Photoshop and Illustrator. Even if those apps ran on Linux, my guess is that the resource needs would still make an Air or a MB Pro a much better choice.
I can't answer for jdf, but, in my case, I've built a lot of applications using Django and Google App Engine on very frugal hardware, probably less than a more recent Chromebook. On both cases, the development environment is very light and defaults to store data in SQLite. Working with Python allows me to skip compiling stuff most of the time. Of course, a JVM is off the table, as is using Eclipse for your IDE. This machine is one of the reasons I went back to Emacs.
I've always been a vim/screen/bash user rather than an IDE, so I can't speak to the experience of using Eclipse/IntelliJ on a Chromebook. The fact that I'm doing everything console based certainly lowers the resource needs since the chroot isn't running another windowing system.
I know the JVM isn't often associated with low memory applications, but it seems like it should be possible. As I mentioned in my other reply, the Chromebook has more resources than the average Android phone, so all those Java Android apps should run fine (albeit under Dalvik rather than Sun's JVM).
I would not dare to run Eclipse under Dalvik. Just the other day, when someone compared it to Emacs here, I wondered whether it should be called "Egacs" rather than Eclipse.
The real problem is IDEs; the JVM is also a resource hog; however, you can run lots of server software on small hardware; heck, my RaspberryPi runs mysql, postgresql and apache (and PHP), plus a django app, and has only 256MB RAM; it's not blazingly fast, and you wouldn't use this in production, but for development ...
I appreciate what you are saying, as I had a CR-48 and liked it a lot. That said, unless you absolutely do not want to perform any configuration or just don't want to spend more money, I feel that the DIY route is better.
For instance, I recently bought a Lenovo x230. I have Arch Linux on it, along with Firefox and Ratpoison. I get pretty much the same thing as I had ChromeOS: a full-screen web browser in one window and a full-screen terminal in another. This configuration has none of the privacy concerns I have about using a Google product and I don't need Google's permission just to create a user account.
(Backups are a breeze too: just a few dot files. I use Firefox Sync to back up my bookmarks.)
Yup. Probably the only other OS you could use to pull this kind of platform off would be Win8RT, but nobody wants to sell win8RT devices because they're scared of users freaking out when they find out their new Windows notebook doesn't actually run real Windows.
Chrome and Win8RT are the only OSes that are good for an ARM-based notebook form-factor, and the ARM chip is necessary to make this device not suck at this end of the cost spectrum.
That and frankly, I think we're all sick of supporting Grandma's windows machine, so getting computer-illiterate people onto a "web-only" device is great.
I won't buy one, I don't need one, but I can see the niches it fills.
>so getting computer-illiterate people onto a "web-only" device is great.
I recently replaced my wife's aging MacBook Air with the Samsung/ARM Chromebook - she much prefers it. It doesn't overheat, nor require frequent restarts. But she has a Masters in CS, and works from the command line, so let's add to, "computer-illiterate people" , "..and people who dont want to spend time nursing their computer".
I've just started tinkering with nitrous.io - I have to say it's very impressive and it makes the chromebook an actual usable device for development out of the box without any tinkering
Don't have one yet, but are there any window managers with high-resolution support out yet? I may just get a Pixel if there are.
I know Unity hasn't, and Gnome 3 (my favorite) has pixel-doubling support on the way, but if there are any others or if you've been able to optimize an X WM to be readable and polished.
All I use it for is Sublime Text, so things more-or-less look great for me. The problem with Linux is that there are multiple ways of doing any one thing. So, just because Openbox and Sublime can handle high DPI doesn't mean your run-of-the-mill KDE/GTK app will.
Virtual Terminal 3. If you press Ctrl-Alt-F2 (forward arrow), you'll get to VT2. You can install crouton and run xinit, which will start a window manager in VT3 (Ctrl-Alt-F3/Reload).
Good question! I'm sufficiently interested in technology for its own sake that I keep abreast of developments in the PC industry, so I already knew about Chromebooks, and that they would be a good fit for her. My wife does not keep abreast of developments in the PC industry (she wont mind me saying that :), so as far as she was concerned, there was no such thing as a $250 PC that would easily usurp her MBA, so she didnt even consider it.
With Haswell, the Asus could really hit it big. Ubuntu, I strongly think, has its future as the sort of super-Chromebook. More advanced, but still manageable.
I have one of these since February and it's far better than any Chromebook - x64, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD, extremely portable, and runs Ubuntu 12.04 LTS by default. No weird ChromeOS limitations, no push to cloud storage by all means etc. Just the keyboard could be better...
How is it for speed? On my old low-end Dell netbook and desktop, I would get frustrated every time I did an "apt-get upgrade" or install as I waited what seemed like 10-15 seconds just for the "Reading package lists..." step to complete. On my MacBook Air this step is instant, which I attribute mostly to the SSD. I'm suspicious of regular hard drives now (though on the flip side I now only have a tiny amount of space).
Both CPU and HDD are bottlenecks, it's not a speed king. HDD is a regular 5400rpm one, the Celeron 847 1.1GHz is also rather slow. I used it for some Java + Scala compiling and it took significantly longer than on MBP (10 vs 2 minutes). Also, I was able to run FL Studio under Wine and it was capable of recording my MIDI playing in realtime for arpeggiated sounds, though it had problems with 4+ simultaneous channels. Keyboard is really bad. Otherwise for the price it's currently unbeatable in my opinion. For my purposes a large HDD was more important as I make a lot of photos and hence need a lot of storage. I use it while traveling in "less safe" countries, such as those in Latin America - I don't really care about losing it.
I've thought about buying one of those repeatedly, but have been afraid that it won't play HD video smoothly or have decent battery life (the bigger issue; My netbook started out getting 7.25 hours and still gets 3ish years later). Obviously would immediately swap the spinner for an SSD, too.
I've actually been hoping that Haswell would revitalize the market for machines like this like you mention, but all it seems to have done (so far) is make every machine like this get a touchscreen thrown on it and marked up another $150.
How is it on power consumption? I'm using a n2600 netbook as a home server, always on but just for ssh & things, it has 2gb ram, I could consider an upgrade if it doesn't use a lot of electricity.
A friend of mine recently bought some ~$500 laptop with Windows 8 on it. Buying a new toy like that should be fun, but when that thing showed up he just spent a week being frustrated with it. And I was very little help. I don't even understand Windows 8. I've recommend Chromebooks to people, at half that cost, and when they get it they immediately love it.
The problem with netbooks is that they were full desktop software running on hardware that was far, far short of a full desktop. They're netbooks, but far too often they weren't powerful enough to even run a modern browser with the weight of the OS hanging off of it.
A Chromebook is really the only true netbook that's ever existed.
That doesn't explain why companies killed netbooks though. A lot of the low-end full sized laptops are now running netbook-class hardware at netbook-level prices, with all the performance issues that goes along with it. You just can't get anything smaller than 15" anymore without either shelling out for an Utrabook or Macbook or buying a Chromebook.
To be fair, OEMs didn't kill netbooks. Microsoft and Intel did - by stopping the OS and processor deals that made netbooks possible in the first place.
1. People were expecting a laptop; they are not; however, they're decent computers (don't do video, don't run VMs ... :), and portability and price are really nice.
2. Laptops got cheaper, and netbooks didn't ; when the first netbooks came out, they were less than half the price of the cheapest laptops; now, they're about the same price :(
There's a lower bound price where it's just not worth making and selling a computer of that price point because your per-unit price won't justify the inventory costs, design effort, risk and support costs. Right now, it seems like that price is ~$350 for PCs and $250 for Chromebooks. That may be the real innovation of ChromeOS: Windows usability without Windows licensing fees, plus lower support costs. Plus, you don't have to worry as much about inventory becoming obsolete, because the OS will update as soon as they connect anyway.
> The problem with netbooks is that they were full desktop software running on hardware that was far, far short of a full desktop.
I didn't have a problem with my Acer netbook. It's slow, but not horribly slow. The main laggard factor is the 1gb RAM, which is too little for a Windows 7 install.
However, I had to remove all the crapware first. If they didn't ship with those installed, they wouldn't make money from all those juicy contracts.
Same setup here. While I got a newer laptop a year ago, when I really need mobility, the Acer netbook is the first to go into my backpack. It runs Ubuntu, Unity, Emacs and my choice of Django/Flask/App Engine stacks. Mine has 1.5 gigabytes of RAM and I'm considering giving it a small SSD drive. The slow disk seems to be the worst performance bottleneck.
Fellow netbook user, Thinkpad x120e, 6 gigabytes of RAM and a recent 256 gigabyte SSD (recommended!) make for a plenty capable machine. It used to last 6 hours, but could do with a new battery. And USB3 ports etc. but it generally flies.
Someone further down mentioned a beer-induced $800 repair on a MBA. I dropped half of mine in a sink of water (don't ask) and it works perfectly. Tested the 'splash proof' keyboard quite thoroughly.
Definitely a market for lower-end sub-$500 machines that are actually capable of running anything.
See, when I said that the Chromebook is the only true netbook that has ever existed, I meant that the term "netbook" implies that the device is configured to prioritize the use of a web browser over that of native apps. This is assuming that web applications offload their processing needs to a remote server, so the hardware can be lower power. That's where the "net" in netbook seems to come from.
In the sense of a true netbook-as-a-thin-client, the Chromebook is the only competitor in this market. What you have with 6GB of RAM and a large hard drive is a small form factor laptop. I agree that there's a market for lower-end cheap laptops. I disagree with calling them netbooks, because then you get confused posts with people asking what the point of a netbook is. The Chromebook is the point of a netbook.
I did pick up on that, but struggle to believe you genuinely believe that the term "netbook" originated from a concept of the browser-only system. I suspect you might be mangling the semantics to fit a product you like. The most likely origin of the term for me is the mass-media, recommending the lighter units for web-browsing as that's all they were capable of. This all before pads and tabs hit the big-time. Or, specifically not manufacturers intending to build browser-only systems.
Cue a few years of Moore's Law, and the net effect of a market for affordable yet usable portable machines produces capable, upgradeable machines. And tablets. Cue content producer/consumer distinction etc.
I was taking the term to the most extreme literal meaning, yes. Because to me, if a netbook is not designed almost exclusively for web-apps, it's not a netbook. It's an ultra-portable laptop, a category that has been around a lot longer than the EeePC.
$800, hahaha; my co-worker paid that much to simply repair his MBAir after being on the receiving end of a beer. They resale for more, so it wasn't a bad choice, but the idea of paying the original cost and then such a repair cost floored me.
If there is innovations to be had with laptops, it is resistance to common desk issues like spilt drinks. The device being cheap is parallel with these needs. Making something thinner and more proprietary and glued together is the wrong direction for me.
Some high-end laptops do take those issues into account.
Here's a video of a Thinkpad drinking a full glass of water while playing a video: http://youtu.be/1SWi6LlFGjk
Here's a video of a Thinkpad taking lightning bolts from a pair of Van de Graff generators for a whole minute without any problems: http://youtu.be/JXsDfuVctFk
Resistance to common household wear and tear such as spilled drinks or being struck by lightning is certainly a rare quality in a machine, but it's not unheard of.
Two guys (doing a promo spot for Lenovo) jumping on a trampoline with thinkpads and water balloons, then pouring water into one, all in glorious slow motion.
Sort-of, but you still have netbooks; I have an old netbook as my developer computer ! it has an Atom, which is slow, 2GB RAM, and an SSD; I dual-boot windows and Linux; can run Visual Studio Express, and of course, all Linux stuff (I even run Unity on Ubuntu). You can get an Acer netbook for about the same price of an Acer chromebook.
Also, we've just bought an Acer V5, 12.1" with touch screen, 4GB Ram, and an A6 processor; really nice, for $429 ; it's a sub $500 laptop that doesn't suck; basically, a slightly nicer netbook :)
Chromebooks are nice, especially for simple stuff, but there are nice cheap laptops too :)
I don't know how much it's in sales, but for what it's worth the Samsung ARM Chromebook has been the #1 bestselling laptop on Amazon for almost 9 months straight, since it came out last fall (I know because I've looked every now and then, and it's always been #1):
But I don't agree with the last paragraph that Chromebooks are ready to go to higher-end. At least for the next few years, Chromebooks should stay sub-$500, with most of them being ARM-based and sub-$300, but with a bigger battery (even more important than upgrading the resolution, I'd say).
They last about 6-7 hours, but they have an embarrassingly small battery (about as big as the ones in 7" tablets). Double the battery size, keep the ARM processor up to date and the price under $300, and that should be the strategy going forward for the next few years for Chromebooks.
You've made this incorrect claim about battery size a bunch of times here, and I've corrected you a bunch of times. At this point I'm starting to think that you aren't just genuinely mistaken, but have some kind of agenda. (Even if I can't figure out what it could be).
So for the Nth time, the ARM ChromeBook has a 30Wh battery. The Nexus 7 has a 16Wh battery. This is not "about the same", it's a factor of 2 difference.
What would be about the same is the 2012 MacBook Air (35Wh) -- a device that incidentally has almost the same form factor as the ChromeBook.
Now, Apple did manage to inch it up to 38 Wh in the latest release. Maybe Samsung will be able to do get similar relative improvements. But if you're genuinely suggesting that a low-end machine 11" super-thin laptop could have a 60Wh battery... Well, I just don't know what to say.
I think they can target both markets. Honestly, the Pixel seems overpriced for what it's intended to do, but if you plan on installing linux on it, you'll probably get your money's worth.
I think the lower priced chromebooks are a great deal, and they should stay focused on that part of the market. I genuinely never would have purchased a netbook until I saw that the chromebook had the hardware it does at the low price point it has.
It's hard to over-estimate the convenience of a laptop you never fear losing, breaking or seeing die some horrible way. Just take another Chromebook, login, possibly wait a minute for all your apps to sync (if you use large apps) and viola - welcome back to your computer. Viruses? hah.
And all that for half the price of an iPad.
This is the laptop parents can give kids and folks can give their elderly parents without worrying about spending too much time fixing it and removing viruses.
I think the Chromebook paradigm is going to take some time to catch on, but once it does it's going to be terrific for everyone. I can't wait til it spreads to other platforms (namely smartphones and gaming consoles) as well.
"Hey, my phone's out of battery. Can I check my texts on yours real quick?"
A) many people use Crouton, so there's no centralized control AT ALL. Even if they don't, the only centralized control is over what version of Chrome you're running, and OPTIONALLY whether you're allowed to log in to the device, what your preferences were, and what windows you have open.
B) there's no fine-grained tracking built right in. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You have the source code to Chromium available to you, please provide evidence. If you believe the visible source code was augmented to add tracking, prior to being installed on the device, then it should be relatively easy to show a Wireshark log demonstrating the fine-grained tracking you speak of.
If you're just going to install a Linux distro doesn't that defeat the point?
I thought the whole idea of chromebook was that you used google services rather than locally installed apps. So yes, inherently more tracking since they want to monetise ads.
> If you're just going to install a Linux distro doesn't that defeat the point?
It doesn't defeat the point for the buyer, since its often the most cost-effective way to get basic hardware for a linux laptop.
It doesn't defeat the point for the hardware vendor.
Heck, it doesn't really even defeat the point for Google. Sure, it may not be as good for them as you using ChromeOS, but its better for them than you either using Windows or MacOS (or paying for Windows or MacOS to get a Linux box.)
The intended method of use is Chrome OS, there will be geeks who buy it as a cheap Linux laptop but that's not really the target market or how they are mostly used.
The idea of the chromebook is to move away from native apps that run on your computer to cloud apps where your computer serves as mainly a front end to google's datacenter.
Please offer a shred of evidence that buying a Chromebook exposes you to client-side or server-side tracking, other than ChromeOS updates, and the OPTIONAL log-in system with preferences and opened web pages.
Wouldn't you just sign into the same netflix account on both computers? The only other way I can imagine to do it would be to pair accounts together somehow, but that could be awkward if you and your wife are at different points of watching the same thing since you would lose each others places.
I think Plex media server might do some of that for normal video formats, though I can't see Google and the MPAA being excited about building software to make playing ripped DVDs easier..
Well, in that aspect you actually have a very close experience with an iPad: except for the device material value, you can toss it and get a new one to be identical just by signing in and waiting for it to restore the automated backup from last night.
One other exception: I gave my mom a Samsung chromebook and an iPad. The touch interface of the iPad is very intuitive for her and she uses it. The chomebook is being used as a paper weight. Btw ... I don't want to be an Apple fanboy here. I gave my wife's niece a cheap Android tablet and she loves it and uses it (mainly games, email and Internet surfing). I suspect a Chromebook would not be the right solution for her as well. I think tablets hit the sweetspot when it comes to content consumption devices.
The question then is the following: are chromebooks appropriate for content creation? I suspect the answer will be yes someday soon. However, the elderly and children market will not be the right audience for such devices.
Yeah, I've always sort of made fun of my father's hunt-and-peck typing technique, but one advantage is that it works just as well on a tablet with an on-screen keyboard. So, his iPad is better for him than any laptop would be.
Yes, the difference being the difference between an ipad an a laptop (full keyboard, larger screen, etc) and the price. Tablets are great but they can't replace laptops for all use cases IMHO.
chromebooks own 25% of the market under $300. OK. So who's the 75% they're eating into, I know thats not apple. Go to amazon, and its ... nothing. There doesn't appear to be a sub $300 laptop market other than chromebooks?
Unless they're really twisting definitions and calling a $186 ipod touch a "laptop under $300 that isn't a chromebook"
A quick search on BestBuy.com turns up 5-6 PC laptops less than $300 (looking at only in-store options, not their listing of "online" laptops where they partner with other sellers). I see similarly priced machines in WalMart alot too.
Could be, but then instead of writing "Chromebooks have in just the past eight months snagged 20 percent to 25 percent of the U.S. market for laptops that cost less than $300, according to NPD Group Inc." they would have used the word netbook, or "electronic device" or something like that.
There is a marketing problem in that I have a nexus 7 tablet and a bluetooth keyboard. What's the marketing message differentiating my nexus 7 from a chromebook, other than the screen is a wee bit bigger on the chromebook and the apps on the nexus 7 almost perfectly match the apps on my phone? There doesn't appear to be a marketing message differentiating them.
At my local Best Buy, they're always sold out. A few times I've overheard conversations of folks checking it out. They just want a cheap laptop, and you hear the usual questions: "Can I hook up my scanner?" "Will it run Call of Duty?" "Can I sync my iPhone?"
I think it's a great device, and I'll likely buy 1 or 2 or a few. However, I don't think that the marketing communicates what it really is, and folks are getting burned as a result.
I wonder, when sales performance is reported, is this gross sales, or net after returns?
I bought one at bestbuy last week (as I was about to leave on a trip), and I definitely got the impression that most buyers didn't know what they were getting into. Several salespeople double-checked that I knew this was not a "normal laptop." One guy said they'd been getting a lot of returns from people not knowing what "chromebook" entails.
My two best buys in the past year were a 200 dollar new chromebook for my oldest daughter and a 375 dollar new ASUS 11.6 inch touchscreen Windows 8 laptop. The Chromebook is the only computer in our house that has never crashed and never had a virus/malware problem. The ASUS Vivobook has worked great and I enjoy Windows 8 on the touchscreen. I hardly ever use my Ipad 3 anymore. I will never waste money on an Apple product again as I get a much better bang for my buck with the alternatives on the market now.
I happened to get a Chromebook for free some time ago. At first I didn't think I'd have much use for it. At the time I did much of my casual browsing on a tablet. For "serious" stuff I had laptops.
I've found that it has displaced the tablet for most casual browsing. I think the main reasons is that while it's slow, it's still faster than a tablet. Having a real keyboard is very nice. It also works well as an SSH terminal.
I don't think this really speaks to any growth in that market sector. Rather, Google is just taking over the low-end sector with software which matches the abysmal hardware.
Basically we're looking at the bifurcation of the market. People who can afford it have Apple devices and everyone else will end up with Google products subsidized by advertising dollars.
You speak as though Windows and Linux dont exist. Over 90% of the market use those operating systems. Did I misinterpret your comment, or do you really live in that much of a bubble?
At $200, it makes a nice second laptop that you aren't afraid to break/lose. It won't replace your "real" computer, but it's a better size for reading/writing email than a smart phone.
I think the Chromebook looks interesting, but in Canada the major selling point (price) is moot. Right now on Amazon.ca the cheapest Chromebook is $399, while in the $349-379 range I can choose from several makes and models of fully-functional 15" laptops.
Yeah, they're my default PC recommendation these days for non-power users. Enough power for web/e-mail/streaming video, 6 hours of battery life, great form factor, and build quality that's shockingly better than just about any PC I've used before this year. I'd certainly recommend them to anyone looking for a second PC. My girlfriend and I have one in our living room sitting next to our more capable Macbook Air and I have little urge to upgrade to 2 high end systems.
Consumers know the pattern: over time, technology gets cheaper.
Laptops and desktops are not selling well because, at the same time there have been no huge leaps in actually useful technology, manufacturers are trying to upsell us toward fancier machines that don't actually help us do anything.
At this point, a regular laptop should cost as much as a cell phone and be about as efficient. Instead, we're getting $1400 "ultra-books" that aren't so ultra that anyone actually needs one.
That is really quite stunning in the context of the whole laptop market. I am kind of intrigued at how Google is pulling this off. There are so many good arguments against a Chromebook for most people. You can buy an ordinary laptop for similar price and just run Chrome and get the same thing but with more features. Even without that, this seems to violate the law that a new entrant into a market has to be not just better but compellingly better to get market share.
How is Google doing it? Are they going direct to pitch these to bulk buyers like academic, students, businesses, governments? Or are "normal" consumers actually wandering into Best Buy and choosing it over the Windows laptop right next to it?
A bit of both approaches, to be honest. People used to argue that OS X is the far better OS because of its dead simplicity, but that's falling flat on its face now that Chromebooks have arrived. No malware PERIOD -- no code can execute without some sort of complicated exploit, and if that wasn't enough, Linux runs at its base, which adds an extra layer of security.
The beauty of the Chromebook is its simplicity, and extensibility. It's practically a $249 Linux box for the power users -- load up crouton and off you go. For the consumers who never need to touch the Linux layer, they can use the top layer without ever seeing Linux, and enjoy computing nirvana.
Once NaCl is mature enough that most developers use it and once the Web Store populates with offline apps, watch this start to take off. It will ride on the same merits that drove OS X for over a decade, but it will fly higher.
Just you wait. This is the final redemption for desktop Linux.
I have said it many times on HN and I'll say it again: I LOVE my Samsung ARM Chromebook. I'll just quote my previous comments:
It's $250 so there's no argument about buying X or Y netbook instead, you can barely get anything with a keyboard that browses the internet for that price. Also for that price you get 2 (3?) years of 100GB on Google Drive and 12 Gogo WiFi passes, which together are already worth over $250. So you can throw the device in the trash and still come out on top.
Now to the computer itself:
First, the battery life is awesome, 6.5 hours of solid use (WiFi model) and since it turns on from cold in ~7 seconds you can turn it off between sessions and not lose any power at all. If that's too long for you just close the lid, you'll lose about 1% per hour but everything resumes instantly when you open it (and I do mean INSTANTLY).
Second, the hardware is really excellent for the price. The keyboard is my favorite laptop keyboard out there (even against my MBP) and the trackpad is second only to Apple devices imo. It's the same weight/size as a MacBook Air but maybe 0.2" thicker. The only hardware downsides are the plastic chassis and the screen's somewhat bad viewing angles.
Third, it runs most of what you need right out of the box. I don't even have my in developer mode, you don't need that to use Google's Secure Shell and Remote Desktop Chrome extensions. It has an Offline version of Google Drive so you can keep your most important documents local and everything syncs when you're connected.
Fourth, it's stress-free. Because everything is synchronized to the cloud and the hardware is so cheap, you never have to worry about this thing. If it breaks (which it won't easily), just go to your nearest Best Buy, drop $250, and sign in with you Google account and you'll be back exactly where you left off (even down to the tabs you had open).
I really can't recommend this device more highly. It's definitely not the right device for full-time development but as a companion to a larger laptop or a desktop it's a perfect second machine and much more useful than an iPad or Transformer-style tablet (I've had both).
I've haven't missed Skype yet. Voice calling in Gmail works perfectly for me on my Pixel. If I need Skype, I can use it on my phone. As an absolutely worst case scenario, I can use Skype through Crouton.
Let's say the user just wants the hardware and form factor. Can the user dd over ChromeOS and use their own bootloader and open source OS? Are these netbooks "remote controlled" by Google at such a low level that the user cannot "opt out"?
I bought the acer chromebook for my 5yo. He loves it for playing Lego games, watching YouTube and Kahn Academy vids, as well as using code academy and getting emails from gamgam.
I borrow it for business trips and works well enough. Best laptop I ever bought.
they might still have local storage, but depending on the cloud's a no brainer IMO
The main issue here is can people do without native apps and only a browser. I think a lot will change when we have programming IDEs and Photoshop inside a browser.
Well, no, the OS is software on which, arguably, nothing is private. But you can put a different OS on a Chromebook, and apparently plenty of people who are concerned about ChromeOS -- whether for privacy or other reasons -- are putting Linux on them and finding Chromebooks a good way to get inexpensive (or not-so-inexpensive, in the case of the Pixel) Linux laptops.
It isn't any different than running Chrome on your other legacy platforms. Privacy comes in different forms. The content I place on my drive directly is private. Beyond that, it has the same privacy as your web browser.
I don't think so. Don't compare the Chromebook with a laptop: compare it with not having the Internet.
A year or two ago, I set up a retired family friend with an old desktop machine running Ubuntu and Chrome.
He loved using it. Who wouldn't love the web if they'd never had it before? All he ever did was launch Chrome and browse websites. Sometimes he'd watch catch-up TV, but that was also through Chrome.
A while back, a failed Ubuntu upgrade left the machine unbootable, and I had to reinstall Ubuntu for him. More recently, the HD crashed.
So for his birthday we bought him a £200 Chromebook. It has exactly the same relevant capabilities as the old Ubuntu desktop, but it's small, light, low-power, and unlikely to get viruses or ask incomprehensible questions about software updates.
Yes, an iPad might have worked too, but it would have been a lot more expensive, less familiar, and lacking in Flash (which, if all you ever do is browse websites, can still be somewhat limiting).
I traded in my Thinkpad for a Pixel. The Pixel is the only laptop I use. (I would say it's the only laptop I own, but my apartment is a veritable computer museum and several of the specimens are laptops.)
For me, the biggest problem with laptops is keeping them sync'd with my desktop. I could use a laptop as a primary computer, and with better expansion options than previously exited (USB3, dual Display Ports, etc.), but I still find laptops limiting, meaning I only use them when I can't have my desktop. My desktop has 6 cores, 4 drives, a high-quality sound card, a real serial port, etc. These things are all important for what I use a computer for, most of the time, and a laptop just isn't good enough to be my only machine.
Chrome OS solves the synchronization problem for me. The configurability is restricted more than my average Linux box, so there is less to concern myself about setting up. My browser settings and extension sync, the desktop background syncs, etc. I can take a brand new Chromebook and be up in running in 5 minutes.
That's the value proposition of Chrome OS for me. Once it is up and running, I can ssh to a real computer and browse the web, which is what I'd do with a ultra-excellent billion-core superlaptop 99% of the time anyway.
The other 1% of the time, I'd like to use a laptop for portable software-defined radio applications, and as it stands, Chrome OS is terrible for that. But since Chrome has APIs for talking to USB, serial ports, and audio, I'm actually working on supporting controlling my radio and analyzing the I/Q inputs as a Chrome packaged app. The advantage for me is that I'll have SDR functionality on any computer I encounter: you can install packaged apps from the webstore on Chrome OS, Mac, Windows, and Linux, and everything will Just Work.
Finally, the Pixel has the best screen I've ever seen on a computer.
Anyway, Chrome OS is nowhere near its full potential just with the APIs available today. I think as more developers write awesome web apps or Chrome apps, more people will use Chrome OS, further incentivizing developers to create even better non-desktop apps. But as it stands, I am 100% satisfied with the Pixel as my primary laptop, and I imagine many other people are too.
I feel the same about my Pixel. I use the Remote Desktop Chrome app to log into any number of machines I've configured. If I need to SSH into another machine, there's an app for that too.
I still use a "powerful" laptop as my work machine. but this is primarily because of the work I'm doing for a client. A significant part of my day I spend logged into remote systems; something I may start doing more on my Pixel.
It is truly a shame the cost of the Pixel is so high.
During my Google Glass intro, I had the chance to use a Pixel during the meeting. My wife was more attracted to the Pixel than the Glass. They probably could have sold her one that day if they had pushed it on her.
You're way off. Chromebooks fit cheap hardware with an appropriate operating system, such that performance is still acceptable. For example, that Samsung Chromebook with the ARM processor. It has a low-performance chip in it that only uses (I think) about 4 watts. So the battery can be tiny and it still gets very good battery life. Which means the whole machine can be very small, very easily. And it has a very nice trackpad and keyboard, with a reasonable screen. Samsung was able to cut costs in places that Chromeos doesn't _need_ it and make what is a very good machine for $250. Put Windows 8 on that thing and in two weeks the tray will be full of crapware icons and the whole thing will grind to a halt.
>I asked a couple different Best Buy reps if the Chromebooks had a big return rate. "All the time," both said frankly. "They return it in a couple of days. They don't know how it works."
I'm sure that's true, however my own anecdotal experience with Best Buy is that they can't or don't properly educate consumers as to the right thing to buy in the first place.
