"A Chromebook for everyone"; cool. The article talks about the author's childhood in India, how he dreams of bringing computers to everyone. The price makes it a device that could be bought by anyone. The size of the computer, the autonomy, the low power, everything looks like it's meant to really democratize computers to an even wider audience, say in developing countries where 3G/LTE networks are surprisingly developed and cheap (depends on the country, of course).
But then, its bundled with Verizon, limited to the US and the UK. What are the 3G frequencies? Is this thing locked with Verizon? Say I want to give one to my friend in Vietnam, so he/she can get access to a computer, will the 3G modem support the carrier's frequencies there? Unknown: it's listed as "WLAN : 802.11 a/b/g/n, WWAN : Verizon 3G". Great.
The device is nice, the price is nice. But marketing it as "a Chromebook for everyone" is just wrong. It's a laptop for people in the US, that's it. And really, I wonder what kind of "humanitarian" problem it's solving. I understand the low price is to create a following for the product, but I find the "Chromebook for everyone" brand phony.
Unless "everyone" == "Verizon customers living in the US".
"A Chromebook for everyone" (who wants to be tethered to the Google ecosystem and the preying telcos).
A "laptop for everyone" is far easier. There are thousands and thousands for $100 or less on eBay that are far more powerful, easier to repair, have local storage and don't tie you to an ecosystem or a telco. Grab a Lenovo T61, chuck Mint on it and you've got something several orders of magnitude more useful. They even work in space:
I have a thinkbook. I love it to death, but I can't leave it on for more than 15-30 minutes before the sound of the fan going annoys me too much. Same with the MacBook Air for that matter. A friend of mine has one and as soon as he launched WoW on it, the fans kicked in and I was amazed at how loud the Air was.
These have no fans. No moving parts to worry about. That is one of their biggest advantages. I can use an ARM netbook while my SO is sleeping next to me. Not so for an actual laptop.
I don't think this is a fair comparison. You might as well compare a tablet running a web browser to a laptop running a 3D game.
For anything other than gaming, I don't even notice my Air has a fan (I agree it's -very- noisy when it's running, but the point is for the stuff you're going to do on a Chromebook the fan isn't going to be noticeable on any other laptop either), and that's the same for most modern laptops I've used.
That isn't what I'm comparing though. My use case is obviously different. For me, I'm working on software, I'm compiling software. On an ARM machine with no moving parts, this is a silent activity. On every other machine, this is far from silent.
I brought up the Air mostly because I didn't know what the noise was when he started the game. I thought that the Air didn't have any moving parts. In fact, I'm still debating getting one, but a machine that's silent at 250 that can do what I want it to is a much faster decision than one that is ~1000.
I know my use case isn't typical, but it is the one I rely on when deciding what to get for myself, and silent is good for my needs, and how much noise the computer makes when I've got all cores running on a compile is a factor, for your needs it may not be, or you may not do the same type of work.
The point I'm getting at is that no matter what I do on a machine with no moving parts, it's going to be silent. An older laptop on eBay may be more useful for some people, and I'll never fully move away from a workhorse machine until ARM performance is on par, but it's still nice to have when she's sleeping and I'm still mulling over a fix.
I understand your point that it's silent. I just don't see how comparing the another laptop to the Chromebook by talking about something that the Chromebook won't run (eg WoW). Personally, apart from 3D gaming I haven't noticed any noise at all from my Air (from compiling, rendering video, etc).
You said yourself that you're not in a position to fully change to something ARM-based because of performance issues, and that's precisely my point: what's the point of saying the Chromebook is superior in it's silence? I might as well say that a piece of paper has superior battery life to my laptop because I can use it for 24 hours without charging. They do different things.
(On a tangent, what are the options for actually developing software using ChromeOS, my understanding of it was there was little to no access to local filesystems for that sort of thing? Or are you talking about installing some other OS on it?
Edit: Read your post a bit further down about putting Gentoo on it. Still curious if there's much scope for developing in ChromeOS itself... did a bit of searching but not a lot of the hits sounded practical or were native.)
The newest Air uses a different type of fan (as does the retina MBP). It's quieter (perceptibly so) and is nothing like the traditional "whining" fan; it sounds more like white noise. In my rMBP, I'll intentionally max out the fans when playing a game (to reduce heat on my hands) and the sound isn't really noticeable at all. It sounds like the ambient noise from my air conditioner or the highway near my house; in fact it's so close that I literally can't hear the laptop if I'm sitting on my balcony.
That said, I think you're significantly overstating the noise of a modern Mac in the first place. Some of the non-retina MBPs run pretty warn, but my last-gen Air was silent unless I tried to play games on it. Even when writing code. I could build a ~500 file Java project in IntelliJ and it wouldn't even get warm, let alone kick on the fans.
The only Mac experience I have personally is a core duo version (one of the first intel MacBook Pro) and then listening to the coworker's air. I'm glad to hear that newer ones are quieter, and that's definitely going to weigh in on my next "workhorse" laptop.
Cool. FWIW, my retina MBP idles around 45 deg C, goes up to about 65 when watching a Flash video (maybe 55 for HTML5 video), and as high as 90 deg C when playing XCOM in Parallels (at which point I manually crank up the fans because OS X tends to prefer heat over noise and I do not).
>These have no fans. No moving parts to worry about. That is one of their biggest advantages. I can use an ARM netbook while my SO is sleeping next to me. Not so for an actual laptop.
That is a ridiculous statement. My mac air is silent under normal use for everything but 3d gaming.
I think you are somewhat confused. (Edit: I had misunderstood the parent; see below.) The $250 model does not appear to be bundled with Verizon. In fact, I don’t think it has 3G capabilities, just Wi-Fi.
The higher-cost Chromebook 550 (Intel) does support 3G.
So your entire argument is based upon a misunderstanding, is it not?
Sorry, I was refering to the 3G model (329.99$), but I forgot to make it clear in my comment.
However, my perspective is that Chromebooks are meant to be used with a connection to the internet, which makes the 3G model sort of mandatory (for 3G/LTE access is more accessible - in my experience - in developing countries than full internet connections). It's in that perspective that I hold this argument.
For the case I'm basing this opinion on, a basic internet connection (DSL) in Vietnam costs much more money than a basic 3G/LTE internet connection. Also, a DSL connection will only be usable from home. I know this DSL/3G relation is also the case in other developing countries.
Ah, that does make a lot of sense, and jives with what I've gathered of developing markets, as well.
One imagines some sort of tethering to be feasible, if not universally applicable, for those who want a computer form factor and already have 3G Internet on their phone.
I don't know about Vietnam, but in the Middle East(at least in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt which is where I've been in the past few years) 3G is usually way more expensive than DSL due to low data caps. I pay 10$/mo[1] and have a 100MB/mo cap + 0.1$ for every MB over quota. DSL is ~30$/mo and a 12GB cap(this is Lebanon). So at least in this part of the 3rd world 3G is useless for anything other than checking your mail, chat and the occasional google search.
[1] That is, over and above the 20$/mo for the phone line itself. So if I were to get a line just for 3G usage(so as to put it in a tablet or chrombook, for example) it'd be more like 30$/mo.
Exactly. Tablets/Netbooks have been going down in price for some time, so while this is cheap by hardware standards, I would take into account the hidden costs - that many users will need to shell out ~$30 a month on data plans.
So this $250 + ~$600-700 over 2 years for a total of almost $1000. I'd consider that instead of the "low sticker price" when comparing options.
But then, its bundled with Verizon, limited to the US and the UK. What are the 3G frequencies? Is this thing locked with Verizon? Say I want to give one to my friend in Vietnam, so he/she can get access to a computer, will the 3G modem support the carrier's frequencies there? Unknown: it's listed as "WLAN : 802.11 a/b/g/n, WWAN : Verizon 3G". Great.
The device is nice, the price is nice. But marketing it as "a Chromebook for everyone" is just wrong. It's a laptop for people in the US, that's it. And really, I wonder what kind of "humanitarian" problem it's solving. I understand the low price is to create a following for the product, but I find the "Chromebook for everyone" brand phony.
Unless "everyone" == "Verizon customers living in the US".