by mockindignant on 9/1/18, 1:19 PM with 414 comments
by sarcasmic on 9/1/18, 3:47 PM
I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models. And build quality and the nature of hardware compromises at that price point have always been unpleasant, save for a few concentrated efforts like Lenovo's IdeaPad line. In other words, $600 laptops are second only to $200 laptops in making Windows look bad, making them an easy target for an OS that proved that $200 laptops can actually be quite good.
Still, there are few challenges. Chromebooks' filesystem paradigm deemphasises local storage to the point of cumbersome, relying on Google Drive or custom interfaces and implementations built for each app that know how to pull up past work. This is a smart idea when everything works, but makes import, export, and context switching harder, and makes sharing a feature of the product rather than a file-based affair.
On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension) are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser.
Nonetheless, with Service Workers and graphics APIs and auto-resuming applications and unintrusive updates, and people using Google products anyway, Microsoft should be worried, because they're being challenged for customers in a segment where their OS is least compelling, and was largely used by default.
by mabbo on 9/1/18, 3:18 PM
He laughed. He said it was a joke. He made it very clear that he didn't understand what Google was even thinking. And that stuck such a sour chord on me. Here's a company well known to be hiring the brightest people in the world, and they've announced a direct competitor to what you're doing... and you're laughing? It was like seeing an experienced chess player playing against a rumored-to-be-brilliant child prodigy and laughing at the stupid move the child was making.
I spent the next summer working on the ChromeOS team.
by nickjj on 9/1/18, 4:34 PM
So for $350 you get a 1080p IPS panel laptop that weighs under 3 pounds and has an SD card, headphone jack and other goodies. It easily runs a bunch of Dockerized web apps without being slow.
One of the best portable computing devices I ever spent $ on. I still use it almost every day 2.5 years later.
Details can be found at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
by scarface74 on 9/1/18, 3:39 PM
For the server, I recently had to write a process that takes messages from a queue in AWS and store it to a database. It ran well as a .Net Core based lambda running on a 256MB RAM Linux VM.
I did the same with a .Net Framesork app that inherited and the smallest EC2 instance we could use was one with 4GB RAM. It was barely usable. We had to upgrade to 8GB. Microsoft has been successful because of Moore’s law hid the increasing bloat of Windows. But once smartphones and low resource required operating systems became popular, they can’t compete.
by disconnected on 9/1/18, 4:41 PM
This hasn't been true for years.
They have realized that it doesn't matter whether you use Windows, Chrome OS, Android or Linux, or anything else: everything is in the cloud now, so the OS is pretty much irrelevant.
Azure, Office 365 and heck, even Linkedin are doing great:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/microsoft_huge_2018...
So I very much doubt that Microsoft is sweating it about Chromebooks.
by Crontab on 9/1/18, 5:23 PM
by Someone1234 on 9/1/18, 4:22 PM
But that being said, Chromebooks don't scale with better hardware very well. You can spend $250-350 and get 90% of the experience, and a very good experience at that. If you spend three times more you'll get more memory for Chrome and slightly more responsive tabs but hardly blows your socks off.
Microsoft likely aren't shaking in their boots because of a $600-900 Chromebook. If anything Android emulation is the real "killer app" since it massively expands a Chromebook's capabilities, including running Microsoft's own Android-Office apps.
by matt2000 on 9/1/18, 3:37 PM
Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of reliability but still include features for advanced users like developers and business analytics.
Definitely feels like a missed opportunity, especially with growing discontent among developers with the Mac hardware line.
by syntaxing on 9/1/18, 5:22 PM
I know you can run Crouton but it just doesn't feel the same.
by open-source-ux on 9/1/18, 3:32 PM
We've seen Microsoft criticised, quite rightly, for introducing tracking of users in Windows 10 (euphemistically labelled as telemetry), yet Google gets no criticism. In fact we get the opposite, people rush to Google's defence. The double-standard is hard to understand.
Presumably, if you think it's fine for ChromeOS to record everything you do in the OS, you equally think it's fine for Windows/Mac OS/Ubuntu to record everything you do too (non-anonymously of course).
by anoncoward111 on 9/1/18, 1:30 PM
by 013a on 9/1/18, 4:58 PM
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os...
by beezle on 9/1/18, 6:46 PM
by joezydeco on 9/1/18, 6:10 PM
That's really the takeaway here. GSuite has gotten its hooks deep into elementary/secondary education and now that's starting to sweep into the college market.
Families also shop for new laptops around the holidays, and they'll want something that dovetails with the work kids are doing at school. If the choice is an iOS or Chrome device, the choice becomes a lot easier when they're nearly the same price.
by torgian on 9/2/18, 10:29 AM
Or just a used thinkpad.
But I guess I’m not part of the normal demographic anyway, so....
by komali2 on 9/1/18, 9:23 PM
I don't know anything about desktop application development, but for example in college I would use PowerPoint a lot. Was there some specific limitation that made for PowerPoint to be a Windows only thing? Was it that Microsoft just refused to make it for different operating systems? Or was there no point because everyone had windows installed anyway?
I'm kinda just chewing the fat here but in 2018 with iOS, osx, Android, windows, and Ubuntu being the main operating systems of machines, why'd it take the second level of abstraction of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Edge working together to make sharing apps across machines a thing? Like, why didn't, I dunno, some cross platform python library (I know nothing about desktop apps sorry) instead be The Universalizer?
by notananthem on 9/1/18, 8:58 PM
Google was crap at hardware, are they good now? They're hiring like mad right now for hardware PMs from other orgs, and that'll grab some younger talent, but they need pretty seasoned people to rebuild a whole hardware org. They have good hardware design teams but they're fractured from eng, biz, strat and more.
You can be good at a network of your ODMs but that doesn't mean the product comes out to target. Chromebooks were positioned as this cheap school thing for a bit, but then the pixel kinda overshot this by a lot.. they need clear segmentation and targeting goals.
by woodandsteel on 9/1/18, 8:13 PM
A consequence of this is that MS has always focused on making their OS and applications useful for businesses, at a great sacrifice in ease of use and security for consumers. Apple jumped in to focus on ease of use and security, but their computers have always been too expensive for mass adoption.
Now Google is going for the mass market with a secure and easy to use OS. Microsoft can't really fight back because to do would mean abandoning the business market. And it understandably doesn't want to do that because that's where the big bucks are. So we should expect to see ChromeOS steadily gaining in popularity, though it is an open question as to how far it will also go in the enterprise.
by jokoon on 9/2/18, 9:54 AM
If not, I would avoid it. My experience with C++ and macbooks has been pretty bad.
by jimmcslim on 9/1/18, 9:09 PM
Availability of Chromebooks in Australia is still very spotty (can’t get the Pixel easily for example) so the Microsoft hegemony isn’t being threatened Down Under!
by orionblastar on 9/2/18, 6:11 AM
Windows laptops are a joke because low end laptops uses slow CPUs and Intel graphics. Mid end laptops for $600 have faster CPUs and Nvidia graphics but suffer preloaded bloat and virus issues a Chromebook can avoid.
I got a 10 year old laptop with Linux Mint on it that runs great. Windows 7 and above run too slow on it.
by csomar on 9/1/18, 4:22 PM
Here are things you do on Windows:
1. Browse the Internet using Chrome.
2. Play a relatively demanding Video Game.
3. Run Office, Word and Excel.
4. Install your Canon Printer and print a few papers.
5. Plugin your Nikon Camera.
6. Run Adobe Photoshop to do some tweaking.
Most people do that on their laptops. We are still far from being 100% cloud. Also ChromeOS is not an improvement over Windows. It is a change of environments. OSX is an improvement. The only deal is that it is prohibitively expensive.
by sunstone on 9/2/18, 9:22 AM
by sebringj on 9/1/18, 5:25 PM
by fredley on 9/1/18, 10:37 PM
by soniman on 9/1/18, 5:19 PM
by phobosdeimos on 9/1/18, 6:02 PM
by mentos on 9/1/18, 6:01 PM
Sadly Remote Desktop is lacking in a lot of ways mainly the refresh rate makes it very difficult to resolve the rendered scene I’m working on.
Any suggestions?
by xacky on 9/2/18, 1:40 PM
by michaelmrose on 9/1/18, 7:04 PM
Of course you could carry around an external drive but do you want to have to plug in a drive every time you wake up your computer.
by sg47 on 9/2/18, 5:56 PM
by yeukhon on 9/1/18, 7:30 PM
by floatboth on 9/1/18, 7:39 PM
I want more powerful ARM ones… RK3399 is a great step in the right direction, but I'd love to see a chromebook with, say, the new Kirin
by booleandilemma on 9/1/18, 7:42 PM
by hi41 on 9/2/18, 1:07 PM
by beerlord on 9/1/18, 3:14 PM
All of this might be OK for a schoolkid, but for anyone else you might as well stick with a Windows laptop for real work, or an iPad for real consumption.
by partycoder on 9/1/18, 4:50 PM
Windows' duck taped UI makes absolutely no sense.
On top of that, you get ads, nagware and your activity data is exfiltrated to their servers... and this is on a product that you have to pay for.
I don't mind paying for a product, but Windows does not offer any added value.
by gd2 on 9/2/18, 7:40 AM
by paulcarroty on 9/1/18, 4:41 PM
It's better invest that money in new/used laptop.
They was competitive only with $200-300 prices.