There are only three meaningful things you can do with a computer with specs like this: development, design, or gaming. And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things.
Perhaps this is a vanity product for the wealthy. But wealthy people are going to just surf the web on an iPad.
Exactly. ChromeOS is not for such powerful machines, because the OS itself is not powerful. So ChromeOS with a $1000 machine is far from a perfect match (at least it isn't yet, maybe 5-10 years from now).
But right now ChromeOS is and should be for light web machines. And I've said it many times before. There's absolutely no reason for Chromebooks to use x86 chips. I've said Google will almost surely mess up the pricing of Chromebook Pixel because they never seem to understand how to price a new product.
Maybe if they would've made a quad core Cortex A15 machine with this display and for $500, that would've been a little more attractive - although for people just looking for browsing the web, there was no need for such a high resolution anyway. Just keep Chromebooks at $250 and use ARM in them, and get to that 10h battery life.
Why pay $1,299 for a thin client OS even if it's running thick client hardware? I can run a browser and so much more in a macbook air or thinkpad in the same price range.
> companies build screens with more code friendly aspect ratios
I hear this complaint a lot and I think it's based on a flawed premise.
Taller aspects might be better on very small screens that only fill tiny portions of your vision but on bigger screens -- the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer -- you want wider not taller. It's the only way to usefully use your field of view. This is why wider aspects exist.
On my 16:9 aspect 27" desktop screen, my vision is practically filled in the vertical direction -- it is easier to glance to the horizontal edges than the vertical ones. I would use more horizontal space before I used more vertical.
And this is the point of wider aspects -- they use your eyes better. If you buy three screens for your desktop, you don't stack them vertically -- you arrange them horizontally so you can actually see them.
People who keep asking for squarer displays for work should simply get bigger displays and stop pretending that a 13" laptop display is ever a good choice for a working display.
Frankly, anything sub 24" is not a working environment. Anything smaller is either (a) something you use occasionally when you're not at your desk or (b) for people who are not working.
> the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer
Could you go into more detail on this? I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous. Basically, if there's some kind of ergonomics concern I'm prepared to change, but not otherwise.
> wider aspects -- they use your eyes better
Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing.
> Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing.
It's true that in reading, we're only good at scanning approximately 8-10 words per line. This is why letters are the width that they are. But I'm not talking about making a single document fill the width of the screen. That document behavior is a relic of a small-screened world.
Modern computer working environments (particularly programming) generally involve opening a few different documents simultaneously and having them open side-by-side. Multiple editors, browser windows, debug tools, documentation, file-trees, etc. This all needs to go somewhere. It is easier to place these separate documents side-by-side than stacked vertically.
> I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous.
Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window but if you've ever wanted to edit two documents side-by-side there's little you can do on a screen that small. You're pigeonholing yourself into a mono-tasking environment because you don't have the real-estate to present multiple documents simultaneously.
> Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window
No, neither of these things are the case. I'm currently working with Xcode, Blender, terminals and a debug app, as well as my internet distractions, and it's not slow. I do make heavy use of virtual desktops and cmd-tab, and when I was working on a dual-screen workstation I found that most of my work centred on a single screen because I would rather move the app than scan the screen. For me at any rate, a large spatial organisation is visual clutter, and lends itself to hunting for information, whereas the apparent bottleneck of cmd-tab actually sorts information efficiently.
I'm not sure if this is making sense, I'm going down with a cold and focus has gone out of the window in quite a different sense today, but there's my 2c.
May be true for desktops, but if you have ever tried to code on a 1366x768 14" laptop display, you'll agree.
8:5/16:10 or even 3:2 fill the horizontal field of view well while also delivering more vertical space.
Even if 16:9 is theoretically better, why shouldn't we have a choice? Every notebook computer out there besides Apple has a 16:9 display, and I'm sick of it, and many others are as well. At least offer us more than one choice.
I use Visual Studio on a 1360x768 display all the time, and it's not so bad. It does encourage writing the code better because you can't read large chunks at once.
I heard a story where one famous computer scientist (Dijkstra, McCarthy, Hoare, or Knuth?) said something about how using punch cards encourages writing code better because the compile/debug loop is so long and annoying.
> companies build screens with more code friendly aspect ratios
Let's hope Lenovo takes a look at this. I'd love a Thinkpad with a high-res screen, 3:2 display, and of course, the venerable TrackPoint and keyboard. Touchscreen is a nice novelty feature but really isn't required.
> I'll take any steps in the direction of square as positive
If someone proposes a Kickstarter project for a mobile developer workstation with a solid design, 4:3 high-res screen, pointing stick, and great keyboard, I'll be the first to hop on.
Or maybe I should go ahead and make that Kickstarter project a reality instead of waiting for someone to.
Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M6700? It's got a pointing stick and a decent keyboard, high res 17" screen (although, widescreen), solid construction, etc.
I couldn't agree more. I'm currently on an upgraded Thinkpad T61p with 1680x1050 and I'm reluctant to change it to a newer machine because of the 16:9 screens padded with tall plastic border that are available in most notebooks nowadays.
I really hope that hardware makers will finally realize that the primary reason for buying a notebook is not for watching movies on a 15" screen.
Did you know you can put a 14" standard-aspect T61 motherboard in a 15" T60p chassis with a 1600x1200 IPS panel? Did you know that if you want to spend $400 or so, or you're really good at shopping on ebay, you can upgrade that to 2048x1536?
What I want is as many vertical pixels as possible; this is the first new screen I've seen that's got more than my 10-year-old CRT (1536).
(At this point some wag is going to suggest portrait mode, but I've never seen a laptop with a portrait screen that can be used at the same time as the keyboard).
Because there's no space / it would be too small. We're talking about sub-15" display here. So while wide display is great in 22"+, it sucks for everything (except movies maybe) on smaller devices.
I don't especially want a single tall, thin window for code. 5:4 is still wider than it is tall. My usual development environment is Emacs with two panes (Emacs calls them windows for historical reasons) side by side on 4:3.
My thinking is that a screen that's close to square works better for a wider range of tasks than one that's very oblong. A rotating oblong screen that could be tall or wide might work nicely for a lot of situations too, but it would be hard to implement well on a laptop.
This has a far better screen than either of those objectively and a more preferable aspect ratio for many of us subjectively. Installing arbitrary Linux distributions on Chromebooks has been trivial in the past and almost certainly remains so with this one. Many people here would install their Linux distribution of choice on whatever laptop they bought anyway, so the shipping OS is a non-issue.
I'm ready. I realise some people aren't, but I'm young with good vision; "microscopic" is exactly what I want. I'm buying the extra pixels so I can fit more on my screen, not so I can fit the same stuff with better-rounded edges.
I'd argue that Unity looks much, much better on high DPI. I run it on an old crappy 1024x768 and a newer 1920x1080 of around the same size, and the icons/launcher actually look sane at almost double the DPI of the older screen. Unity makes the low-DPI computer look (and feel) like a toy, but I like it a lot on my new computer.
I'd agree with you if you're running Gnome 2, or KDE, though.
I own a Series 5 chromebook. It's hands down the worst machine I've ever owned. I really wanted to like it, too. My issue is that I tried to use it for stuff like reddit, youtube, and whatnot, and because it has no swap space it would just kill background tabs once I had more than 3 or so open. Basically it's a machine built for browsing the web, but because of the way I (and possibly others) use the web it's not useful for that purpose.
I have to put in a good word for the Samsung here. My wife's MacBook finally died, so she got a ChromeBook as a stop-gap, but in reality, it's really all she needs for basic surfing, Google Docs/Drive and watching CBS streaming (for stuff not on Hulu/Roku/NetFlix).
It's cheap, adequately quick, easy to use and has all-day battery life, and charges up at night with the iPad and iPhone used by my toddler.
I'll grant you that if you only do one thing at a time, it works all right. I just tend to jump around a lot -- I use Tree Style Tab for Firefox just to figure out how I got somewhere -- and the Chromebook is a really bad machine for that purpose.
I doubt the Chromebook was ever designed for people like us. We demand far more from our technology and multitask in ways the average user simply doesn't. My Android tablet is nice, but I can't even open up 10+ new tabs at once on a whim and let them all load in the background without it dying.
And forget having them all loaded where I left them when I next return to Chrome.
A friend of mine once put it that if you're the kind of person that thinks a Chromebook is neat, you're not the target market for a Chromebook. I think you and he are both right. The only reason I even attempted it is because I damaged my Series 9 so much that it wouldn't start, so for a few months I just used what I had.
The use case that most people cite when they say that they're developing on a chrome machine is to use it as a dumb SSH terminal to their actual development machines. So they're not going to benefit from the higher performance, because all the heavy lifting is being done elsewhere.
Modern doesn't mean "in use". I haven't seen much more than proof of concepts and demos when it comes to those technologies. Feel free to point out real-world uses if there are any that could benefit me.
Yes you are missing something. Processor performance is not simply a function of number of cores and clock speed. There are vast differences between arm's architecture and x86.
Actually comparing Arm versus x86 is really like comparing apples to oranges. One is RISC, other is CISC. One is good with running multiple threads on single core with highly sophisticated branch prediction, other concentrates having many low powered cores each hoarding threads. And this is very, very crude simplification.
Benchmarks tend to be always favor other camp, depending which attributes you are testing.
Actually Intel chips are since long RISC based, with a CISC translation layer. The real difference is in the more advanced pipeline, prediction and cache and and of course the 32 vs 64 bit + other architectural features. Hence the intel chips use a lot more power than an ARM based processor.
This is not exactly true. In most cases intel's chips are more power hungry but the low power atom processors bring better performance than an ARM cortex A9 while still having lower power consumption. (mostly by racing to sleep faster) And this is a three year old architecture i'm talking about.
Build your own benchmark. Measure whatever you want to do. Or if you insist on standardized testing, use something like SPECInt 2006. Results here: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2013q1/ (sadly no ARM results). Of course that is only for integer calculations, if you need fp, use SPECfp.
I don't see how being CISC rather than RISC results in any inherit advantage. "The CISC approach attempts to minimize the number of instructions per program, sacrificing the number of cycles per instruction. RISC does the opposite, reducing the cycles per instruction at the cost of the number of instructions per program."
People are happy using Chromebooks as development platforms because they're $250 for an ARM laptop with long battery life, and you can hack them to run Ubuntu, not because Chrome OS has any merit on its own.
Things that are cute on a $250 machine are not so cute on a $1,300 machine...
I have two Chromebooks. One with 3G, that runs the stable ChromeOS, and the other wifi only, runs ChromiumOS, latest ToT, mostly because I'm working on getting ChromiumOS to run on our hardware, so it's a bit easy to compare and contrast when things are working and when they aren't. It's dead simple to boot off an sdcard or USB stick. The Chrome/Chromium did a REALLY good job at making the information available.
I'll probably buy the Pixel as well. The more I use ChromeOS, the more I realize how much time I waste on other crap that doesn't really help me get done what I want to do. And using ChromiumOS, there is the "dev_install" command which will set up a Gentoo chroot in /usr/local, that points to the machine that you built it on, and if you're running the devserver, you can run emerge pkgname, it will shoot it off to the server to build it, and once it's done compiling, installs in the chroot. There is also gmerge which will install ChromiumOS packages for you (e.g. A new version of the browser or maybe a newer kernel, without rebuilding everything) OR you can build a new image, hit up the Help page in settings and it will generate a diff on the server and update the entire install to the latest image. It's really an interesting setup, and I really like it.
Everything goes through gerrit, so you can even help out with version bumps and or patches fairly easily. The documentation is really good, and if you happen to hang out on IRC, the ChromiumOS developers are extremely helpful when something isn't clear, and even update the documentation for clarity.
I believe it's much easier to hack this one to run Linux than any ARM-based Chromebook. It certainly has enough memory, storage and processing power to be a decent development machine (provided you avoid heavy IDEs).
It's likely possible to even run Windows on this machine.
It's already braindead easy to put Linux on the ARM Samsung Chromebook. One of the first things I did was to assemble my own personal Linux distro and besides having to copy some blob files out of the original ChromeOS image, it's all very straight-forward stuff and I pulled up about a hundred packages I wanted including an X.org stack without fuss. The compile speeds are adequate if you aren't cross-compiling, I've certainly put up with worse.
I personally have little interest in the Pixel based on the specs. I think X86 is excessively 'big iron' now for a majority of needs and I find the lack of USB3 is mystifying. The screen looks interesting, but it's nothing I actually /need/ and certainly not worth another thousand bucks. I've personally taken to just using X86 for storage/cross-compile servers for the rest of my cheap ARM/MIPS/etc. crap and I've made it a point to stop buying expensive hardware. What $250 buys you now is actually pretty ridiculously awesome.
* Drop Crouton[2] onto Chromebook to get a full dev stack and unfortunate Ubuntu/XFCE environment.
* Set up chroot and start building other people's crap.
* Write to SD Card/internal storage and reboot.
Which step here is hard? Tedious to roll your own I'd give you, but you don't even need to as there's stuff like ArchLinuxARM[3] which skips the middle two steps.
Not gonna lie, I just spent several minutes trying to figure out what context sensitive notifications for Android had to do with hacking the chromebook.
Either after flipping the dev-mode switch and running a chroot or such (thus being outside CrOS's use case), or using it entirely as a thin client (which doesn't need this kind of horsepower).
I really hope that running a chroot or vm becomes a fully supported part of chrome os along with an x server. Working with a crouton ubuntu chroot on my (free) chromebox feels a lot like using OS X circa 10.3 or so and I would consider using it as my full time dev box if autoupdate worked in dev mode. I think i would actually prefer it to modern os x if I could tweak some keyboard shortcuts and run an x sever (even an annoying one like apples) mixed in with aura instead of having to switch back and forth.
I'll assume that's sarcasm but I haven't personally noticed that trend. The only way I made my cr-48 useful was by flashing the BIOS, adding a bigger SD, and running ubuntu on it.
Chrome has a wonderful SSH client [0], and with a $5/mo Digital Ocean [1] (or other [2]) VPS for all your UNIX work, it's a perfectly capable dev machine.
Plenty of people already do this with the $250 Chromebook, and even iPad. The $1,299 isn't for the 32GB SSD. It's for the 239ppi 2:3 multitouch Gorilla Glass display. It's for the 4GB of RAM. It's for the dual core Intel i5. It's for the impressively made aluminum chassis. It's for the 1TB of cloud storage. It's for everything a high-end cloud device should be.
If you're logging on to a remote server to do development,you're not taking advantage of the dual core i5 or 4GB of RAM. You're logged into an image that's giving you maybe 1 GHz of CPU and 512MB of RAM. You're buying a $1,300 machine to do development on a $300 machine, over a shitty internet connection.
It depends what you're working on. If you're doing heavy client-side work (e.g. WebGL) then a beefy client is preferable to a beefy server.
I agree though that I probably wouldn't buy this for development work. But I do think that browser's are still better on beefy hardware than on gimped hardware.
But if you also have ~20 tabs open in your browser, and are streaming music etc... I am doing a thin client setup of sorts, and by the end of the day things start slowing down quite a bit.
I do agree that $1300 is too much, at that price range you might as well get a mac. If it was 600-800 i'd probably jump on it. However, I think the curve ball here is the touch screen. I'd be willing to bet that Google's strategy for this laptop is to do a smaller production run, and get these in the hands of tech/programmer types, and then use the lessons learned to develop a model targeted toward a wider audience.
> I'd be willing to bet that Google's strategy for this laptop is to do a smaller production run, and get these in the hands of tech/programmer types
If that's the case, pull an Apple and ship great dev tools on the installation disk. As far as I can tell, there are no top-notch Chrome OS development tools, just various ways to remote into a real machine to do that work.
Pretty sure Square disagrees, and they know what they're talking about when it comes to XCode. See PonyDebugger, a tool they wrote to pipe iOS apps' network connections and debug information through Chrome to take advantage of the developer tools: https://github.com/square/PonyDebugger
Now, you'd never write code in the Chrome Developer Tools (except maybe the occasional one-liner in the REPL). But the Chrome Developer Tools are great — best in class even — for profiling, visualizing, and debugging.
You do for things like WebGL, client-heavy web apps, and other wonderful upcoming web technologies. The point is that this laptop should last you until it physically wears out, not until it becomes obsolete.
I think it might work reverse to this. You don't buy your think client and then figure out how to live with it. Rather, Google is betting that in the future people will be using thin clients and cloud services because of all the other reasons they are attractive.
Once you've already decided you want to live in the cloud, then your question becomes, what is the best possible device I could buy for doing that? And that is what the Pixel is for.
Thin client, thick client, cloud, local, etc, these are all only relevant to technical people. Focus on use-cases. What does the Pixel let you do that a Macbook Pro does not? Have access to all your documents from anywhere (over internet connections of various levels of unreliability?) No, because you can do all that on a Macbook Pro. Does taking away the ability to do things locally improve the user experience in some other way? Arguably, it improves maintainability and makes the UI easier to use.
Is that the target market for the Pixel? People whose main concern is reducing maintenance burden and having an easier to use interface? Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?
> Arguably, it improves maintainability and makes the UI easier to use
When your entire OS is cloud based, I think you get some synergies - you can reliably sit down at any computer and everything "just works" with all your state exactly how you left when you got up from the previous one.
So yes, you could purchase a Mac Pro, but because it's not cloud based from the ground up there are massive gobs of local state such that you continually need to worry about sync'ing things here there and everywhere, installing apps everywhere, etc. So in world where the default thinking for every application is to store local state, removing the capability for local state is necessary to achieve a true thin client.
> Is that the target market for the Pixel? People whose main concern is reducing maintenance burden and having an easier to use interface?
I think that's not really the selling point of this high end machine. This is Google's statement that cloud based computing is better even for people who do demanding, complex tasks (I'm not saying they are right, but I think it's what they believe).
> Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?
As I said, you're underestimating Google's ambition for what can be done with a thin client. An iPad is not suitable for highly intensive desktop tasks at all. A chromebook has all the physical features of a high end professional laptop, but is 100% cloud based, and thus can be used as a real computer for real tasks.
> A chromebook has all the physical features of a high end professional laptop, but is 100% cloud based, and thus can be used as a real computer for real tasks.
Except it can't. There is a theoretical possible future in which everyone has 40 mbps unmetered LTE and powerful apps exist in web form, but if anything the trend has been the opposite in recent years (carriers eliminating unlimited data plans, apps moving back to native on tablets and phones).
Yep, I completely agree - I'm hugely sceptical about whether this future where we can all rely on high speed network access 100% of the time will ever arrive. But I don't think Google is - they are betting this is coming. And in the meantime they are trying to provide just enough local state (HTML5 style) to get you by during the outages.
> Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?
None of the ones who need to write documents and emails, or edit spreadsheets.
For spreadsheets, it's still less than perfect because Google Spreadsheets are still worse than Excel wrt scripting and managing large datasets. But security, ease of use, and lower maintenance burden might make up for it depending on what your needs are. For my parents, this would be perfect.
Unless you wanted the gorgeous 2560x1700 display... Many people have paid close to the whole computer's price just for the screen (I'm typing this on a 2560x1440 screen that I paid $999 for).
I don't see the point of having a pixel density that high; almost no one has sharp enough eyesight to distinguish individual pixels at even lower densities than that, and enough people have poor enough eyesight that they won't be able to read text on software that doesn't scale its fonts properly.
That resolution is appropriate for a monitor with twice the diagonal size.
Also, what's up with the 3:2 aspect ratio? That seems awfully odd.
almost no one has sharp enough eyesight to distinguish individual pixels at even lower densities than that
That's exactly the point. Apple markets its high-PPI displays as being higher-resolution than the human retina[0]. It does need some help from software to not cause usability problems like font scaling and tiny images, but we've had the hardware capability to do this for a while. It's past time we improved on this.
Also, what's up with the 3:2 aspect ratio? That seems awfully odd.
If I had to guess, I bet a lot of the people involved in bringing this machine to market wanted 4:3, but someone in marketing and/or a focus group said that would be perceived as old-fashioned, so they got as close as they felt they could get away with. I'd really like to see a writeup on the reasoning from someone involved though.
[0] I believe the accuracy of said claim is disputed.
> That's exactly the point. Apple markets its high-PPI displays as being higher-resolution than the human retina.
But the resolution doesn't need to be any higher than the maximum resolution of a human retina. By definition, you'd be unable to see the difference; you're just left with the scaling problems of an extremely high resolution on a very small display.
Apple's successive retina devices have decreased in pixels per inch, but have increased in pixels per degree at their intended viewing distance as larger high-PPI devices were introduced. Of course, sometimes people use devices at distances other than those the manufacturer intended, and some people have better eyes than others.
The point is, current high-PPI screens haven't actually banished the pixel from human perception just yet. There are still gains to be made, but they aren't nearly as significant as quadrupling pixel counts over previous devices.
You mean the iPad? I remember the iPhone having a very positive reaction.
As a general rule, most of the time when people say "this is going to be a failure" they are right. The iPad is the exception, not the rule. And Apple has market-making ability that Google can only dream of.
Well, I mean, given that most new product launches and most new business ventures fail, of course the naysayers will be right more often. That doesn't mean they actually have insight into why products fail.
So, that having been said and because this is the internet, I'll rush in with my probably foolish and ill-advised explanation for with this won't be a game changer: In this case, I think the price vs. capabilities will make people compare this unfavorably with other ultrabooks/macbook airs. For the price, there isn't much here that can't be copied, easily, and quickly – and if I really want the cloud connectivity, I can get that on my ultrabook.
What's the unique value proposition in this product? I just don't see it being compelling – except that it's not an Apple product (don't get me wrong, I'm typing this on a Macbook, but I recognize that some people don't like the fruit vendor).
> That doesn't mean they actually have insight into why products fail.
I think it's gut reaction: I wouldn't use this product or recommend it to my friends. I think most of the time, that gut reaction is on point. Sometimes it's wrong, like the iPad, because you don't see the use for it until you try it, but that's the exception.
>Well, I mean, given that most new product launches and most new business ventures fail, of course the naysayers will be right more often. That doesn't mean they actually have insight into why products fail.
I regularly use the SSH client. I wouldn't call it wonderful; it works, but that's about it. Highlight a wrapped line? GNOME Terminal will Do The Right Thing, Chrome's SSH client won't and gives you a newline. See a URL? GNOME Terminal will let you click to open; Chrome's SSH client won't.
Not even remotely true. Super high pixel density screens are an unalloyed win. Everything you do on one looks better, most particularly, text rendering, which is absolutely superb on my rMBP. I would expect Google's screen to be comparable.
I spend 12 hours a day looking at screens. Sharpness makes that more pleasant. So does a wide viewing angle, good contrast ratio, accurate color reproduction and adequate brightness. This screen likely does pretty well on all of those factors. Considering how much time programmers spend interfacing with screens and keyboards, it might make sense to spend a couple days' pay on good ones.
Many of us consider this screen's aspect ratio a big improvement over the 16:9 of most PCs for working with code/text as well.
Text sharpness on a retina screen is amazing. You know how lots of people turn of anti-aliasing for code because they don't like the blurriness it introduces? Anti-aliasing on a 250 dpi screen looks as sharp as your 1-pixel thick coding fonts at 72 DPI used to.
I got a cr-48 in november 2010. The new chromeOS remaps ctrl-o to "open window" even when in crosh, so you can't save files in nano or pico. I stopped using it altogether. It's gathering dust.
I'm still using mine (got it December 2010), but I replaced the ChromeOS with a Linux. It actually works great, especially for a free laptop that's over two years old. I agree that the last several updates to ChromeOS made things worse rather than better, though.
I guess you are talking about the $250 chromebook, I am using a lenovo x120, having all my dev setup in digitalocean 1GB server. Do you use X or just fine with command line/emacs? Just curious to know how other people are using ec2/linode/digitalocean for development.
These are really cool tools that I didn't realize existed! I think I may take advantage of one of them!
However as the other reply said, it seems silly to buy a big powerful incredible machine just to do all of your actual work on a virtual server. Why not just buy a cheap machine and an expensive server instead of vice versa?
I want good performance and it feels wrong to buy a beefy, sexy machine and gimp it with a 1 core 512MB development bottleneck.
AKA lesson learned: the pixel is not for cost-conscious developers.
If you're doing CPU/GPU intensive web development this would come in handy. WebGL is pretty much a no-go on the ARM based Chromebooks but would perform fine here.
I paid $200 for an Acer C7, $80 for 16GB of RAM, $100 for a 128GB SSD, and $50 for larger capacity battery to end up with a portable linux box (running ubuntu 13.04 now) for under $450 that is light, fast to boot, and has reasonable connectivity (wifi, gige, 3x usb ports).
This took me about an hour of reading, 45 minutes to go from sealed boxes to linux, and a small phillips screwdriver (one screw on the back to get to ram+hard drive).
So I have to buy another machine to develop and test my stuff on? What's the point of a powerful laptop if it's just a dumb terminal to connect to my actual development machine?
Why not just buy a $300 super cheap laptop and do the exact same thing? Sure I'll have less resolution on the machine, but seeing as the developing is happening on another machine all together, it seems like the performance would be similar.
Well, if you're a developer, presumably this isn't the first computer you have owned. I'm using a 5 year old cheapy HP laptop as my dev server and it works wonderfully.
There are other alternatives, of course, Cloud9 premium account gives you full shell access, Action.IO gives you full shell access as well.
Regarding the idea of using an old laptop as a dev server, have you run into any issues as a result of having the laptop on all the time (such as overheating)?
Also, how would you set it up so that you can log in to your laptop from outside your LAN? I have a few old machines lying around and it would be great if I could put them to use as servers.
Shouldn't have overheating issues as long as you sit it so that the vents can breath. I leave mine in the basement where it's a little bit cooler. My current uptime is 45 days, I only restart for kernel upgrades and never shut it down.
I purchased dynamic DNS, which IIRC is around $35/year, well worth it for the convenience of logging into my home server whereever I am.
You could put the original Chromebooks in Dev mode and have a terminal with a build environment, or just install your own Linux build on it. Or even Windows. Not the fastest machine in the world, but not the slowest either. I quite liked it. This feels wildly overpriced to me though.
None of which use the $1250+ machine to actually "run or test the code you write." If you are just using a browser for coding, why pay that much money for a machine to run a browser?
One could argue that if a browser is your only environment, that you'll be spending the most time in, then why wouldn't you want the best option for running said browser? The way I see it, if you're going to be working in a completely remote/cloud capable environment, then a powerful, fast, beautiful screened machine to work from makes the most sense.
My current job gave me a Dell Latitude E series machine for work. I work exclusively in AWS. The screen on this laptop is so horrifically bad that I practically get sick looking at it. Compared to my personal (2010 era) macbook pro, or the Retina MBP's I've used at my last two jobs, there is no comparison. I'd much rather have a lightweight powerful little machine that I can ssh from and have some sort of IDE or text editor to work on my AWS projects then worry about a big bulky crappy laptop that is overkill for my work.
Obviously I realize this is MY current use case, however I'd be willing to be that the majority of dev/devops type folks on HN have a similar type of use case. AWS, Heroku, just about any PaaS, Saas, or Iaas, etc... would take advantage of a machine like this beautifully.
Oh and the last time I had an Air (right before upgrading to the rMBP), My use case? Chrome, Chrome, Terminal, RDP, Chrome. That was at a PC Game dev/publisher company where I administrated all windows based desktops, mac laptops as well as all servers of misc variety...
Sooo.....Is this machine useful? I think it is, and I am excited to check it out and may look to getting one.
One more thing, I too am one of the lucky Cr-48 owners and LOVED the concept. Biggest reason I hacked it to load ubuntu? SSH. Had the plugin existed back then? ChromeOS ALL THE WAY BABY!!!
I spent some time with cloud9 convincing myself it was usable and bought a chromebook only to find that aswell as chromeos being a massive let down c9 ran like a dog on it. Main thing is it was ridiculously slow, the same actions taking noticably long on the chromebook compare to my laptop.
It's interesting to see all the people on here saying that there's no point to having a beefier machine to "just browse the web" and then see your comment which would appear to indicate that there is a need for more performant web-browsing devices.
Its ancient and these days massively underpowered but i could sit and do sid by side operations in cloud 9 and the laptop would always complete noticably faster. For example i would be debuggin and i would ask to go to hte next step and in the laptop it was immediate, on the chromebook i might wait a second.
Very very odd and very unexpected but it made cloud9 totally unusable for me. Chromeos is also horrible for nearly everything else i do, even reading pdfs, so i cannot think of any reason to shell out for another machine with it installed.
Totally dig hosted IDEs. I think it's the way of the future. But why do you need a powerful computer to use them? How does it help? I'm genuinely asking.
The display...and your hosted IDEs don't do all their processing on a remote host. I believe a lot of the compilation/interpretation/services are provided locally via JavaScript.
"And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things...I really don't get this product."
I completely agree. If I pay $1300 for a laptop, I expect to be able to do some serious graphics work or video editing. Instead Chrome Pixel gives you powerful hardware coupled to an internet-connected OS with basic, limited apps like Google Docs. (As an example, Google Docs is so basic it can't even span table cells. Worperfect 5.0 could do this over 20 years ago. Pay $1300 for an OS so lacking in features or capable software? Is this progress?).
By "specs like this," I'm assuming you just mean the high resolution display. I disagree that a hi-res display is only useful or "meaningful" for development, design, or gaming. It's great for web browsing, which is my main usage for the iPad, and I happily upgraded from iPad 2 to the 3rd generation iPad just for the retina display.
The i5 is hardly a gratuitous CPU. It's a fairly mid-range CPU. The phrasing of the first comment sounds like it's talking about some completely over the top system, like a 12 core Mac Pro.
Web browsing is pretty darn good on the iPad and comparable Android tablets, but it's still a far cry from the performance you can get on x86 hardware. Many Surface Pro reviews mention this specifically. Now, there's still obviously value judgement to be made: is the Pixel worth the extra money, extra weight, and worse battery life compared to an Apple or Android tablet?
Worse battery life compared to an Apple? I think you are wrong. I think Google is being pessimist when estimating the battery life to be 5h when their capacity is 59Wh. For comparison, Apple advertises the MacBook Air 13" battery to be 40% longer (7h) when their capacity is 15% less (50Wh). Maybe Google estimated a higher average power consumption (eg. using the LTE wireless network which is more power consuming than wifi).
MacBook Air 13": 50Wh - starts at $1200
Pixel: 59Wh - starts at $1300
MacBook Pro 13": 74Wh - starts at $1500
Basically, the more you pay, the more capabilities and battery life you get. And both Apple and Google seem in line.
> I think Google is being extremely pessimist when estimating the battery life to be 5h when their capacity is 59Wh.
The battery life depends, not on the watt-hour rating, but on the watt-hour rating divided by the power required. More power, fewer hours. Maybe Google knows something about the actual power requirements that resulted in this estimate.
Just as an example, if the unit requires 11.8 watts, then the battery life will be:
59 watt-hours / 11.8 watts = 5 hours
> For comparison, Apple advertises the MacBook Air 13" battery to be 40% longer (7h) when their capacity is 15% less (50Wh).
Different battery, but also different power requirement.
> Maybe Google calculated it while assuming you were using the LTE wireless network, or streaming HD movies, or something else quite power-hungry.
You're speaking as though all these units have the same power requirements.
I am well aware that the battery life depends on the power required. My point (implied) was that the MacBook Air 13" has roughly the same hardware as the Pixel: same CPU, same GPU, same amount of RAM, same type (DDR3L), etc. The only significantly more power-consuming devices in the Pixel are the display and LTE hardware. So if you don't use too much these (eg. turn brightness down, don't use LTE), then shouldn't the Pixel be expected to consume about the same amount of power as the MacBook?
Let me reply this way -- why would Google sell their unit short? What reason would they have to underestimate battery life?
It occurs to me that, if they exaggerated battery life in normal usage -- typical user brightness settings and typical peripheral activation -- it might create a public relations disaster not unlike the infamous Tesla test drive.
Also, even with the same battery technology, units won't necessarily behave the same as the battery voltage falls. Some will cut out sooner than others as they approach the end of battery charge, a trait that depends on the power supply design.
On general principles, I just don't think they would intentionally undercut their own unit.
Everybody knows there is no industry standard to measure battery life (basically which workload to run when measuring it). For example Anandtech measured the MacBook Air 13" as having a battery life varying between 3 and 7.52 hours depending on the workload: http://www.anandtech.com/print/6063
So my point is that Google would not specifically have the goal of underestimating battery life, but just that it is almost guaranteed that they have different standards from Apple for measuring battery life.
The only way to fairly compare battery life is to have the same person/group run the same test on the 2 laptops. But even that is prone to human-error (eg. what if the tester forgets to disable LTE when testing the Pixel?).
> ... it is almost guaranteed that they have different standards from Apple for measuring battery life.
Yes, most likely, which is why Consumer Reports articles are often such interesting reading.
> The only way to fairly compare battery life is to have the same person/group run the same test on the 2 laptops.
Yes, and (just to make it more scientific) the testers shouldn't be able to tell which laptop they're testing. Not so easy to do, but necessary for an unbiased evaluation.
I just think Google's battery life specification is most likely correct -- they have no good reason to over- or underestimate it. But I agree that an independent test would be useful.
Thank you, this confirms what I suspected. Google makes the laptop stream music and play full screen video for some amount of time, whereas Apple makes it only browse wirelessly ("up to X hours wireless web").
"There are only three meaningful things you can do with a computer with specs like this: development, design, or gaming. And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things."
If ChromeOS wants to do these things, they need something like Pixel.
It's got integrated Intel graphics. That's something I pay attention to because the open source support is great. But I was led to believe that no serious gamer would touch them.
Note also that I could probably develop on it as I use Vim in a terminal, which I believe ChromeOS has.
Yes ChromeOS has a terminal. Just hit Ctrl+Alt+T. The SSH interface is a little non-standard as I recall but not enough to be a problem. It has dynamic proxying support so you can set up a SOCKS proxy through localhost and on to a host in [country] to get around content licensing restrictions. I've done this for Netflix, Hulu, MLB, Fox Soccer, and the London Olympics.
If that's the case then they should have waited to reveal the Pixel. I'm of the mind that you should buy a device for what it is, not for what it may be in the future.
No. Buy a device for what it is capable of doing in the future.
You buy a computer with faster processor so it can support applications in the future.
The Pixel will be the same a year or so from now. I don't think the hardware is upgradable. But it will be handle resources-intensive apps coming in the future.
Many people are not rational when they buy products. All you can do with a pair of jeans is wear them. Nice denim, nice rivets, nice pockets, and a nice zip (or buttons) - and then some quality control. And yet people can pay very much money for jeans. (Sort by price, high to low. (http://www.mrporter.com/Shop/Clothing/Jeans?sortBy=price-des...)
You say that wealthy people are just going to surf the web on tablets. This is just a tablet with a keyboard. Some people type enough to make on-screen keyboards painful to use.
A product making a buyer happy is not a condition for whether a purchase is rational or not. If you have a family, then suddenly you decide to buy a ticket to Amsterdam and burn your kids college money on hookers and blow, being 'happy' doesn't suddenly make all of that rational.
Using that logic I don't know how Apple sells so many of its MacBooks. They're all expensive and have "specs like this", but the vast majority are not used for development, design or gaming.
I can see the appeal of a small (thinner than a MacBook Air), well constructed, blazingly fast laptop. If I could run 1Password on it I would be very tempted to take it for a spin, with the LTE it would make an excellent travel machine.
MBAir is best dev laptop I ever had. Its super light, plenty of power and space for most app development and within reach price wise. Also, I suggest you look up Linus's rant about how he loves Mac book air and SSD for kernel development.
I wish the MBAir had 4G/LTE built in. That (and the higher res screen, and the platform security hw) are the things I like about the Pixel.
I'm sure Apple will Retinize the MBAir in 2013 or 2014. I just don't get why LTE chipsets don't appear in any Mac products. I have a VZ MiFi and it's such a pain by comparison -- I'm fine paying $10/mo to Verizon for each mobile/etc. device I have.
> Using that logic I don't know how Apple sells so many of its MacBooks. They're all expensive and have "specs like this", but the vast majority are not used for development, design or gaming.
A macbook is more than a thin client running SSH and a browser.
My theory is that maybe this announcement was intended to make the $1500 Google Glass seem slightly less ridiculous. It's going to take more than a $1300 Chrome book to do that.
In all seriousness though, I was really excited about this when I saw the first video, then it was reported to be a fraud, and now all of a sudden it has an i5 and it costs twice what I thought it would.
At 600-700 bucks, I was ready to trade in my iPad, but for this amount, I'd rather get an XPS dev edition or a 13" retina macbook for just a bit more.
Before I read your comment I though that computers only good for accounting and scientific simulations. But then I remembered that it's not 1951 any more. Thank you.
</bitter-irony>
I wonder if they are doing this, at least in part, because they really want a Chromebook that is high-end to display in their physical stores? Maybe having a really nice, really expensive Chromebook will make the brand not seem cheap to casual store browsers.
There's the famous framing story about the company that invented the bread maker. Everyone was interested in their product but hardly anyone bought it. They brought in a product specialist who told them to release a second, high-end version of the bread maker. Once they did this, the base model started flying off the shelves.
It looks an awful lot like a Macbook: Just witness the aluminum-like color and the black bevel around the screen. Where it looks different, it's uglier. The hinge looks particularly bad. And judging by the pictures it's an awful lot bulkier than a Macbook Air.
Chrome OS strikes me as an underpowered OS. That is, there's a lot it won't do and it seems mostly suitable for underpowered machines.
UPDATE: this paragraph is wrong; I stand corrected! -- The ChromeBook Pixel has a 4:3 display. Now, I recently came across an old laptop of mine that had a 4:3 display and it looked off. I'm not saying that 4:3 aspect ratio a bad choice in an objective sense, but it strikes me as a bad choice from a marketing point of view.
For one hundred dollars less you can get a 13" Macbook Air. For two hundred dollars more you can get a 13" Macbook Pro with Retina Display. Both these machines seem better than the Chromebook Pixel in every way, including battery life (7 hours versus 5).
In conclusion, I think this is going to fail badly.
It seemed like a pretty safe assumption to make given the nature of the device. Google shipping a web-oriented device with non-square pixels would be very strange of them because of all the potential problems this would entail. Are there any modern portable computers with non-square pixels? For that matter, were pixel aspect ratios other than 1:1 ever prominent on LCD portables?
Last time I had to deal with non-square pixels on x86 was when programming mode 13h graphics for DOS at a 320x200 resolution (which was then stretched to 4:3). The only thing that comes to my mind that you could do now with modern equipment would be to connect your laptop/PC to a bargain bin plasma panel that has a 1024x768 physical resolution and achieves a 16:9 aspect ratio by virtue of non-square pixels [1]. My first encounter with one of those caused me trouble when I wanted to use it with a Linux PC some time ago.
I love that it has a taller/squarer aspect ratio than the vast majority of laptops on the market. I find the current crop of ultra-short screens completely unacceptable for the text-heavy tasks I spend the vast majority of my computer time doing.
I'd rather have 4:3, and my current laptop is a semi-custom Thinkpad I built by shoehorning a newer motherboard in to a T60p just so I could have a decent 15" 4:3 screen and 8gb of memory in the same laptop.
Unfortunately, this particular machine is a little pricey for what it is and not a size I'd like. It should diminish the "these are the only screens we can get" excuse that PC makers keep trying to give us though.
So now Apple has a patent on aluminium color and black bezel?
Most laptops (and for that matter tablets) have a black bezel cause it provides a good contrast from the content on the screen.
When I saw the picture i thought "At least they won't say it looks like a macbook. It has a hard-edge look, from the pictures i looks like it has a dark tone aluminium color and it has that (admitetly awfull looking) hinge thingy.
But hey, it's a laptop and and it's small and silvery, Google made a Macbook clone...
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I agree that it looks too much like an Apple product, but I think the differences they made are nice and the machine over all looks better than the Macbook Pro.
I am disappointed though. One of the images they showed was in low light and it made it look like the whole surface of the keyboard area was charcoal sort of shade. I think that would look way more sleek and professional looking, and at the same time it would help to differentiate it from Apple products.
I wasn't being entirely serious, but fingerprints everywhere did bother me on my iPad. They bother me even more so on my laptop, despite there being significantly less, and it'd be worse with a touchscreen.
I had the same initial reaction, but the killer is the hard drive : 32 or 64 GB SSD... That's a bit short to do local development. Maybe you can change it though.
Nope, I was wondering whether sticking Ubuntu or Mint on this would transform it into a kickass Linux laptop. It's close, but there is a measly 32GB SSD and no option for i7 or 8GB RAM.
I've been using my Cr-48 with Linux for development and it's actually pretty doable, and it only has 16GB and obviously much worse specs. This is, of course, going to depend very heavily on what kind of development you're doing.
The text console fallback would suffer though - it is using 16px font by default and might put the display in highest-res mode on bootup. Then again, you can just change the text console resolution.
Sure, you can make text readable by modifying only 17 different config files. Then you realize that widgets are too small to click on, but that only requires 23 different patches to fix...
As a Chromebook user, I find this device both very intriguing and expensive. I use my Chromebook for writing, Web surfing, light code work. It's a nice little machine to have around. It's not the main event, however.
For heavy-duty work, I use my 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, which not only has a much better screen, touchpad and other hardware, but it also has a big SSD and a full-fledged OS. Chrome OS is not a OS X competitor, and there are a lot of things I simply cannot do on ChromeOS. The beauty of ChromeOS is that its a lightweight OS that can be placed on cheap hardware to make it usable and fast by serving as a thin client. I don't see it as a great OS to stick on expensive hardware.
I find the Pixel to be an intriguing device, and hope that all laptops have high pixel density screens within five years. This price point is too high for ChromeOS. I'm not spending $1,000 for a machine that cannot do certain computing tasks.
There are no good graphic or photo editors in the cloud. Editing audio and video is very difficult to do as well. Using your machine as a development device without connecting to a server is not possible. Not to mention that the MacBook Pro can play games, run Windows and Linux, etc.
The Retina MacBook may have cost more than the Pixel is going to, but it is worth several times more. Not to mention that Apple has spent a lot of time working with hiDPI screens and has made the OS work well for it.
What would make an intriguing price point? $799. Perhaps $999. It will come down to the software, however. I've never see ChromeOS with a touchscren. Maybe it'll work well, and maybe what would really work well is a Pixel-like device with a detachable screen. But the kind of people that spend more than $1,000 on a computer are looking for more than just a thin client.
It looks awesome, but at $1,299, I don't think it's priced well. That's $100 more than a 13" MacBook. I just don't see that much value in a Chromebook at this point in time.
I honestly think the high price tag is the point. Google is trying to establish itself as a major brand that isn't just offering alternatives to Apple hardware for a lower price. Think of the plans to build retail stores, and how the Android brand is given less prominence these days: they are working hard to build a consumer "Google" brand that's as strong as Apple.
So far most of the devices they sold were priced to be cheaper than Apple's counterparts. This pricing move is trying to say "we have better technology than Apple and it's worth the price", possibly in anticipation of other high-end products such as Glass.
I have no idea if it will pay off, but it's a bold move.
One of the things Apple avoids is $1,300 products that are conceptual beta-tests. It's blatantly obvious that "life in the cloud" isn't feasible for most people yet, not when 10 GB of Verizon LTE costs $90 here in the US, then $10/GB. But with that tiny 32GB of flash, that's clearly what the Chromebook is designed for.
It's bold, but it's not going to sell. The reviews are going to rip this to shreds ("nice screen, but doesn't run anything.") In the end, it's going to be a "what the heck were they thinking?" product that will dilute the brand.
People who "live in the cloud" with a 16GB iPad have very un-demanding needs. They're people like my mom, who take some photos and send some e-mails. They're not going to buy a $1,300 machine to do those things when a $500 iPad does them just fine.
That's the problem with speaking for the general population, you say "most people need more", someone else says "most people only need X" and the conversation goes no where.
You can make some inferences from the available statistics. The Chromebook is priced like an Ultrabook. Nobody is making any money off Ultrabooks, except Apple. Why would anyone spend as much as an Ultrabook to get a machine that does even less than an Ultrabook? I don't think this is that subjective of an argument.
> They're not going to buy a $1,300 machine to do those things when a $500 iPad does them just fine.
I think that this depends almost entirely on how slick it looks and how well it is marketed. Plenty of moms have MBPs that they shelled out the extra $1k+ for to take get on FB and send emails.
I'm not saying that it's _smart_ to do that :) but never underestimate the allure of a well-marketed product.
>One of the things Apple avoids is $1,300 products that are conceptual beta-tests.
How about the original Macbook Air? That was $1800 and pretty much a beta test of the good Macbook Airs that are out now (slow CPU, slow HDD, stuck with 2 GB RAM forever).
I love bold moves and this is certainly one of them. I just don't think it's going to sell well. Yet.
I don't think the average consumer will understand what it does and why it's priced the way it is. I understand what it does and does not do, I work in front end web engineering, and ultimately would really like to see Chrome OS take off (selfishly because my skillset would be very well suited for writing software for it). This is all a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. I just wouldn't plunk down $1300 for one.
But isn't it essentially just running web applications? I know I could download applications from the Chrome app store but I couldn't install any other applications, correct?
Yes, it's just webapps, Chrome extensions and Chrome Apps from the Web store. If you feel strongly that you need to install other software then the Pixel is probably not a product for you... Just keep in mind that it's pretty much the same for all tablet users, since they can also only use webapps and install apps from their vendor's store.
Some will see that as "So Chromebook is better than a MacBook then? They wouldn't have priced it that high if it wasn't. I want one".
Kind of how some expensive wine is sold. Sell it for $15 / bottle and it gets lost on the shelves among others. Put it in a special glass case and sell it for $120 / bottle and surprise people will buy, taste it and think it is really the best one they've ever head.
Not only this, now a cheaper Chromebook will seem like a really good deal.
I don't know anybody who only bought a Mac because it was expensive. They bought it because it was worth the expense.
Chrome OS is an unproven platform that doesn't have nearly the popular support of Apple's products, and it's coming from a company that's still fairly new at both software and hardware design. That's not to say this will be a bad product, but this is certainly a risky marketing strategy. I'd love it they pulled it off – I like the thought of a web-only notebook, even if I don't want one myself – so I'll be crossing my fingers and hoping they pull this off.
Not many people in the tech industry buy Macs because they are expensive, but I'd venture that (like many other trendy products) there are a good number of people who have bought it for the status/trendiness/cost/whatever. Not that it matters really, but it's an odd claim to make that all Mac purchasers were informed consumers. Most consumers are relatively uninformed, regardless of what they're buying, and loads of people buy things for no other reason than that they saw a commercial on TV and can afford it.
What's odd is making the assumption that all Mac purchasers weren't informed consumers. Your attitude reeks of arrogance and superiority (which seems to be common in the tech community).
>Most consumers are relatively uninformed, regardless of what they're buying, and loads of people buy things for no other reason than that they saw a commercial on TV and can afford it.
I have a few friends that work in creative at ad agencies and they would laugh at this.
I'm not saying that it happens without advertising :) but it happens, right?
Also, I am not trying to be superior or critical - I'm not slamming Mac owners, I own Apple products. There is nothing wrong with not knowing the GHz on your CPU. It doesn't matter for many people, and that isn't an arrogant judgment (or at least I don't mean it to be). I just think it's silly that we sometimes assume all people will evaluate technology the way we (tech people) do. Just because a thing is more/less expensive, more/less powerful, has more/less storage, does not mean that it might not be the perfect solution for someone else.
edit: I should add that I buy things for weird reasons all the time. I know nothing about fashion - I assume that the $80 jeans are nicer looking than then $40 jeans. Or I assume that the BMW 3x is a better car than the Accord. I do of course try to look into these things thoroughly, but sometimes I don't care, and I just want to buy a credible product. I suspect that lots of people do this with lots of things that aren't their primary concern - that's all I'm saying. A well-marketed, slick Chromebook could find an audience if for no other reason that there are a lot of people who think about computers like I think about cars: "I want a good one. This one looks pretty good to me, I haven't heard anything bad, it has a good reputation, it looks well-made, I don't want to spend the cycles endlessly investigating it, it's in my price range, I'll grab it."
I wonder if this is intended as a flagship - not so much to actually sell, but to give Chrome OS the aura of quality, so that the cheap ones feel like a good deal, rather than a poor alternative for people who can't afford a 'real' laptop. Google presumably has the cash to do it.
Plus, of course, there's simple media exposure. Most people don't associate Google with laptops, but this is on the BBC homepage at the moment (first story under technology).
People use price to compare wine because we have virtually nothing else to go on. With wine, many people are selecting from options they have no direct experience with (styles, yes, particular wine or year? not in many cases) – so price became a way to discriminate when all else was unavailable.
Depends who buys it. We don't view them that way because we are programmers and we know what an 8GB of ram means or what i5 means. Others look at computers differently (oh, I like the metal finish, this machine feels so fast). Not saying there is anything wrong, it is just how it is.
I think you're dead on and that's the factor a lot of techie people seem to completely fail to understand. We look at this stuff through a completely different lens than the typical consumer. Back in the awful days when I was retailing computers, I can't count the number of times people bought one laptop over the other because of the color or finish or some other minor detail. One of the main reasons Apple succeeds is that they make beautiful products, and it looks like Google is trying to share that market.
That's basically worthless in a country where people are paying $10 per GB for 4-5 megabit LTE service, or else hopping on Starbucks Wi-Fi access points to get 1-2 megabit service.
I can foresee scenarios where that would be useful: when we have unmetered 30-40 megabit wireless service everywhere. But very few people in the U.S. find themselves in that situation.
I don't see that. For most application the typical Wi-Fi access is enough, e.g. for music and movie streaming, working in Google Docs...
Even if it was only working on home Wi-Fi, it would be far from worthless. People pay $200 for a Wi-Fi home NAS. Having your home NAS available anywhere is a nice plus.
Also there is the screen that is higher resolution and multi-touch.
You're going to chew through 10 GB of LTE steaming music and movies. Working in Google Docs, maybe, but Google Docs sucks. I can justify $250 to use Google Docs over Starbucks WiFi. Not so much $1,300 to do the same thing.
Totally agreed - but as has been mentioned elsewhere here, the overwhelming majority of computer owners aren't techies/developers. I definitely wouldn't buy one of these, but if you're basically a web user and you don't want to shell out for the MBP, I could see this being an appealing option I guess.
The first poll is especially telling. Overwhelmingly, people said they wouldn't get this device (2/3 of the voters). The initial iPad was obviously very successful.
The complaints in the second thread are largely a mirror of the conversation in this thread, except for back then, nobody came up with counterarguments in favor of the iPad. Does that indicate that the market for this sort of thing is different these days?
Still using mine. It's a bit laggy, but perfectly usable. I use it every day, and if it were inadequate in any way, I would go out and replace it tomorrow.
Honestly, the only thing I really miss compared to my girlfriend's newer model is that her backlight gets dimmer than mine.
I know this is going to seem like a nitpick, but laptops without magnetic power connectors these days just feel cheap. It's such a simple addition that greatly improves the product. I don't see why larger companies aren't all converting over to them. I know apple has a patent on them, but there's tons of prior art for heaven's sake. I think the only non-apple product out there I've seen with them on it is the microsoft surface (though admittedly the surface one is pretty bad, it's still better than this style of connector).
Overall though it seems like a nice product. I'd probably be interested if I could install ubuntu on it.
Apple exclusively owns US Patent No. 7311526 ("Magnetic connector for electronic device", issued in 2007) and does not license the MagSafe connector or the patent.
Many of the deep fryers I've used years ago had magnetic power connectors. How is Apple's design different? Is it just because it is "on a laptop", and not "on a hot oil basket"?
Edit: I looked up the patent, and it appears they've patented various improvements to the connector, such as universal orientation (can plug it in either direction), and something to do with the polarity of the magnets.
And yet, they wouldn't have been able to use it if Apple didn't let them, because it does power - and that's covered by Apple's patent.
Luckily (for them) most of the incumbents have patent cross-licensing deals, so MS doesn't worry about Apple suing them for patent infringement, and vice versa.
That is one beautiful laptop (note that it's not 16:9 either). I feel like we're missing something, there's no way Google would be blind enough to build such a powerful machine (vs existing Chromebooks) that's so limited by the OS. There's either something we aren't being told or Google's jumped entirely off the deep end.
(Alternative: there's no way they could do a "Retina" Chromebook for reasonably cheap, but the Nexus 10 would seem to disprove that)
It's not really limiting though. Between NaCl and WebGL you can do everything from 3D gaming, to Remote Desktop clients (an RDP client already is in the Web Store). It's true that a lot of the software still needs to be created, but what is going to spur that to happen if not hardware that is tuned for it?
You can't build for NaCl from CrOS, and as it stands you don't have the toolchain (editors, debuggers, shells, etc) one's used to on other platforms. I understand a $400 phone not being able to run it's own toolchain, a $1300 computer less so.
It's much easier to develop on a Chromebook than you probably think. There are many editor choices, there is Web Inspector for debugging, there is an SSH client (in NaCl), there is developer mode, there is Crouton which gives you a Ubuntu chroot without losing the rest of ChromeOS[1]. I don't do NaCl, so I can't speak to how much pain that is, but for web development I find Cloud9, Web Inspector, Secure Shell to be more than adequate.
I've got a Chromebook sitting to the right of my keyboard, and routinely use it as an SSH terminal (that and the keyboard is exactly why I have it). Remote is sufficient, but not always desirable (not just offline, latency can get in the way as well); and crouton and such are kludges vs. having a proper *nix environment within CrOS (not to mention losing verified boot, which I see as a plus overall but glad it can be turned off)
Yeah, I agree that Crouton and the like are "cheating" a little bit, and I don't use them personally. I think you're being a little unfair here, though. You want verified boot and a full *NIX offline toolchain. Aren't those incompatible things? Probably the closest thing you can get to local development without cheating is if something like VirtualBox were ported to NaCl, which I don't believe exists, yet.
Not a full environment; just enough of one for average web development (meaning vim/emacs, git, ruby/nodejs/etc, NaCl compiler, and associated debuggers), a small enough set to be vetted by Google and run at low privilege while still letting an average developer get started out of the box w/o needing to figure out hosting or such right away.
Hell, just adding some project management to the inspector to act as a psuedo-IDE for Chrome apps would be a start. I've got personal attachment to *nix from using so much of it, some 12-year old that stumbled into the devtools has no such attachment.
But you're asking them to open up all of the kernel APIs to Vimscript, Emacs Lisp, Node, and Ruby... that's no different than just being another Linux Distro, which they didn't do for security reasons. If you want all of that, I don't understand why you are against chroot.
Besides, the fact that Chromebooks are running linux under the hood is an implementation detail. They could very well be running FreeDOS as far as the user should be concerned; the platform is Chrome.
I think I am just used to hardware lagging the demands of software. This just seems, odd. Especially considering how much more this computer can do with something other than chrome os. (Correct me if I'm forgetting something, but is there anything chrome os can do that another OS can not already do?)
This feels as vacuous as when the linux crowd used to proclaim it. Hell, just within the webapp realm that Google is good at, they haven't exactly been stellar with long term support of some products. I mean, I never worried about maintenance or viruses in Google Buzz, either. Luckily, I also didn't worry about it sticking around. :)
Discliaimer: I work for Google, but don't know about real strategy decisions about this.
I think it's all about establishing more demand for web apps.
Already I can do everything I need to in Chrome except for a nice development environment, though Cloud9 is getting closer, and music apps like Logic. Those are quite doable though, especially with the Chrome App APIs, someone just needs to get the ball rolling.
The current crop of Chromebooks were really inexpensive and nice for the money, but they weren't going to appeal to the cutting edge tech users who will loudly demand and use better web apps. Chrome needs something that inspires, and I think the Pixel will do that. I've used it for a while now and the hardware is incredibly nice. It'll also create space between the $200-300 Chromebooks and the Pixel for some decent mid-range devices.
I can't imagine there are that many people who want to spend $1,300 to use web apps. People use GMail, Google Docs, etc, because they're cheap, not because they're good. That's why the $250 Chromebooks sell any units--because they're cheap. This thing takes the "cheap" aspect out of the equation, which seems like a mind-blowingly stupid decision.
I use gmail and google docs because they're good. Why else would I use them? Cheap? There's plenty of free email programs out there. None compare to gmail. I'll agree that when I need to get really down and dirty with a spreadsheet, I whip out Excel, not google spreadsheets, but for most of my "lists that need some numbers to add/multiply together", google spreadsheets work great and are always available from wherever I am.
Which is not to say I think you're wrong. No one's going to spend this much money on something so limiting. If we were 10 years in the future and we all had gigabit network speeds, and there were enough awesome web apps to replace the hard working desktop apps (photoshop, IDEs, CAD, etc)... then yes.... but I would still hope the specs would be better for the price. 4GB of RAM in a $1300 machine? What is this, 2005?
IMHO, all it needs for a decent developer environment is semi-sanctioned shell access and a package manager. I've been using the age-old SSH+tmux combo fine, all that's really hurting me is latency. I'm kind of surprised Google hasn't taken up the task of building their own web-app IDE (but not that surprised, if what I keep hearing about Google not allowing code checked out on laptops is correct it's hard to improve much on SSH).
I want this machine to work, I just don't see how it can without being self-hosting.
Well said, that's my thought as well. If you look at the complaints in this thread (lack of VMs, lack of Photoshop equivalents, etc.) won't get created until there is compelling hardware capable of running them. We're already seeing an explosion of web apps to fill the need of regular Chromebook users (stuff like RDP clients are a hot item in the Web Store these days), but it will take something more capable before we get, for example, good WebGL games.
All but one previous Chromebook has shipped with 16 (exception being the Acer, which uses an ordinary HDD), and the amount is almost entirely a non-issue for normal use. Which would add to my theory ChromeOS could be moving past the "just a browser" paradigm it's been going with all this time.
It would cost me $20,000 to transfer that amount of data over 3G, and almost ten times that on another common carrier. The amount of "cloud" storage is irrelevant in most countries.
An even more unfriendly prospect: at a typical Australian upload speed of 100kB/s, it would take 2982 hours (124.5 days) to upload enough data to fill the drive. At this point, most people would have given up and bought a laptop with a decent amount of storage.
I need 1TB of fast storage, not on the other end of an internet connection, especially given that the cloud provider (or anyone that gains access to the cloud provider) can read my data.
With 4GB of RAM, USB 2.0 (how do you even get that? what kind of oooold chipset are they using?) and only 32GB of storage, this thing is ridiculously overpriced and pretty much dead on arrival.
chrome environment has developed enough that the "web browser" is no longer just a web browser. Consider it like emacs as it was way back when GUI's weren't around.
It's a PC laptop. I'm reasonably certain desktop Linux distros will be running on it in the very near future.
The screen is magnificent. And I love the move to a taller aspect (it's slightly larger, vertically, than the 13.3" screen I'm using now).
The board itself is pretty meh, though. Dual core Ivy Bridge with 4G. That will run desktop stuff, but it will do virtualization poorly. Big software builds are going to suffer a lot vs. my quad core laptop (which looks to be about 3x faster). And the 32-64G of built-in storage is mostly a joke; that just isn't going to cut it for serious development work.
But if you want a good laptop in this price range to install Linux on, why get one of these? There are plenty of Windows OEMs who will sell you a better machine (modulo the screen), or you can cough up an extra $200 and buy a 13" rMBP, which has a comparable screen and is technically better in every other regard (modulo 4G, although what's the price for the LTE modem?)
The battery life is crap. I honestly didn't think that $1300 was awful. Pricey, but not awfully pricey. And then I saw the battery life... only 5 hours =( If you want to delight the user with a mobile, battery life needs to be a priority. 5 hours is industry standard in crap laptops. Even the el' cheapo Chromebooks (my cr48) get better than 5 hours.
Where are the real specs? Google have gone and copied what Apple do, and just dumped marketing blurb everywhere.
"Intel® Core™ i5 Processor (Dual Core 1.8GHz)" - What's the model number? There are numerous Core i5 processors and their performance varies, which one am I getting? http://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html
32 GB SSD - What kind of read/write speed? Standard SATA or mSATA interface?
4 GB DDR3 RAM - Is the RAM soldered or user upgradeable? How many ram slots? What's the maximum capacity?
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but at that price, I do actually want to know if I'm buying an appliance or a computer.
The way it is it's useless for me (and I guess most people on HN, though I think basic Ubuntu could fit into 32/64 GB), but it still makes me cautiously optimistic that after years of stagnation and perhaps even regression, the 1366x768 era might be nearing it's end. I can hope that in a year, "reasonable-resolution" (as Linus called it) laptop like the Pixel will be not outrageous or top of the line but simply normal.
And the screen aspect ratio is just a cherry on top.
128GB UHS-I SD cards are about $100 these days, so you could just add a permanent one as Ubuntu's /home. You'd expect to lose at least a factor of four in max transfer speed over an SSD, though.
I can't wait for a teardown. I'm crossing my fingers for there to be an ssd in there attached to an msata interface which could be easily swapped out for something bigger.
I'm guessing that the ram is soldered in though, due to the thinness of the device. Oh well, 4gb is workable.
I feel there is far too little discussion here on the screen.
This laptop screen is amazing. Since we today have light, fast, power efficient and sturdy laptops. The next big thing, is the screen.
A TN screen on a laptop is just sad. My first Macbook pro felt horrid just because I was used to a PVA desktop screen. I kept adjusting and adjusting the screen.
If you take a moment to appreciate your crummy laptop screen you will notice a few things.
1. The screen has a tint to it. Ranging from green to purple from the top of the screen to the bottom. Put the screen on its side and this is very clear.
2. The viewing angles are horrendous. Put on a black background and try to adjust the screen so that it's evenly black top to bottom. At arms length this is impossible, and really annoying when watching a movie.
3. Try having a friend stand behind you while you work and show him a picture of your girlfriend, he'll be shocked at how pale she has become.
I'm currently on a Macbook with retina screen. I have an iPad with retina screen and I have a normal 24" 1920x1200 desktop which used to be my best screen, but is now only better than the screen on my old ipod touch.
People complain about their laptop keyboards. I complain about laptop screens.
Meanwhile, plenty of TN screens are fine -- the 15.6" FHD 95% NTSC gamut screens floating around out there are great, the 13.1" FHD screens on the Vaio Z were great, and meanwhile many IPS screens have a shimmer effect when you move your head off-center, or have weak color gamut. The only good IPS screens are found on some Elitebooks and Precisions.
I'm glad Google is going to offer a high-end Chromebook, but I'd really like to see a $400 model that improves on screen quality and size. A 15" IPS Chromebook would be the sweet spot for me.
Also, I can't help but think that making a chromebook touch screen is a waste of money. Gorilla arm, anyone?
> Also, I can't help but think that making a chromebook touch screen is a waste of money. Gorilla arm, anyone?
Having touchscreen available in additional to traditional keyboard and trackpad laptop interface doesn't raise the gorilla arm problem (since you can still interact the normal way, and aren't forced to use touch to do anything), but enables using touch for workflows where gorilla arm isn't likely to be a problem.
There is a certain cost to Google to provide that big a storage limit "for free", but storage isn't that expensive these days, and most people won't use it all. I would guess that there's room in the Pixel's hefty price tag for that net present value of that cost.
Yeah, if you do use cloud storage in that vicinity, it makes the deal much better. At current prices, 500GB at Dropbox is $500/yr, and 1TB at G-Drive is $600/yr. Those will probably drop before the three years is up so you can't just multiply by three, but let's ballpark it and say it comes with at least $1k in cloud storage. Of course, that's only really worth $1k for people who were actually going to use that much cloud storage, but if you were, it makes the net cost of the device, vs. just buying the storage, quite small.
On the other hand, if you weren't going to use that much originally, but buying this machine lures you into storing everything on Google Drive, and prices don't drop a lot in the next three years, it might in the long-term be a very expensive device...
Jesus. That's approaching SSD prices for storage that's slow and patchy to access unless you're sitting at a desk plugged into a fiber connection, that Google is going to rummage through to sell you ads.
So this looks like it could be a very nice Linux laptop assuming all the drivers are open source (nothing bad stood out in a cursory glance of the specs, though I imagine the noise-canceling and touchscreen won't work on vanilla Linux). Only issue is how well your favorite Linux interface (Gnome, KDE, etc) will scale to such a high pixel density.
Even though I use my chromebook every day, I think this is a very high price point for this device.
Seems like they release a new chrome os device every few months, I would much prefer updating my chromebook every year for 400$-500$ with faster lighter version, instead of investing 1300$.
I was going to jump on this as soon as it was announced. Sadly, I don't think this is suitable for Android development given the specs. What are your thoughts? My GF is very tempted to take over my macbook pro...
It all started a few years ago. People didn't understand at first. It looked hap-hazzard.. but now. Now they get it - but even more than that, they're trapped.
One used to be able to expect both freedom and choice. Now they have neither.
It was a kicker too, starting out with a service here, a device there, a bit of infrastructure over there.... but now? Now its one big system. From bit to brick, its all one big pipe - an experience fully enclosed, encapsulated, enumerated, evaluated and.... exploited. For every single bit of information about, well, everything.
They worked their way down the layers. What was once a web service is now the actual physical net.
You cant push a packet without them seeing it.Most people don' care though - they bought into the web services decades ago. Phones were next, then laptops, service providers and frequencies.
Its basically the commercial version of the NSA these days, hell, there hasn't even been a real difference between the two for some time now.
Now, pretty much any connection is provided by them. They started out nice enough... do no evil and all... but when you're the only game in town - it's pretty hard to not abuse your power. Hell, its more than power. Power is limited... omnipotence is not. That's what they are now - omnipotent, and there isn't anything anyone can do about it now, either.
Every spoken word, every communication mashed out from keyboard to carrier is captured in the goog. They pretty much own thought at this point...
A high-PPI screen is heaven for using Google Maps. I always get so frustrated on my 1080p screen: even with the browser map in full screen mode, I can't seem to see "enough" of it when browsing random geographical locations and trying to get a sense of how the surrounding area looks.
A 239 PPI screen allows displaying a character in an 8-pixel font (eg. "fixed" on Linux) in a 1x1mm area. You could have all the tiniest roads and cities labelled on the map, even if barely readable.
Props to them for making the display vertically rather than horizontally oriented. I've been incredibly tired of the stupidly short 16:9 displays dominating the market. However, one has to wonder why such a good display is being wasted on a product like this. Great specs, great display, but horrible, crap operating system.
Who needs this kind of laptop to just browse the web? I would buy this in an instant if it had some custom Linux distribution on it.
I guess it's Retina or nothing, then, unfortunately.
Besides being too expensive for something in which you can't do real work (yes, I know, you can SSH into a hosted box, but why would I pay $1300 and $X.XX for hosting, to essentially use this new machine as a dumb terminal), what's the point of having a touch screen on a laptop? Haven't we concluded that this is a horrible idea? Just look at this demo (http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/21/4013480/google-chromebook-...) from The Verge, Dieter fumbles around trying to hit a tab.
It strikes me odd that Google, a company with no shortage of talent, can't get retail right. Who is this laptop for? The 12 year old Engadget/Verge reader who thinks this Chromebook Pixel is the nail in Apple's coffin?
This is so misguided. I know I shouldn't be so infuriated over a botched product launch, but this irks me for some reason. I guess it's because I like Google's products and want them to succeed in hardware, but I lose hope when I see questionable decisions like the manufacturing of this neutered MacBook Pro ripoff. Ugh.
I think it's interesting they chose a 3:2 aspect ratio. The price is a bit high for the specs you get, but I suppose a lot of that is the (multi-touch)screen.
The 3:2 aspect ratio is certainly interesting to Google but not to users. It is even less vertical space than with 16:9 or 16:10. So what good is that much horizontal space, apart for ads in a column left or right of the content.
It's free for 3 years which is supposedly "the lifetime of the laptop." Which, I dunno, I would think part of the attraction of a Chromebook would be that it would have a longer life due to everything happening on the cloud, and thus the local CPU, etc. being less important. Ergo, it should have a longer life.
Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate they stick an amazing screen into a laptop with only as much storage space as a Micro SD card. And then charge $1300 for it.
I think this is really trying to push the hardware to do something it isn't designed for. Why get this when you can get a Retina Macbook and install Windows on that for less. I believe they are available for around $1350 right now on sale. You'd get 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD and better performance/battery life. Plus you can then run Chrome on that :)
Just ignoring the specs and the Chromebook concept for a second (yes, this baby is useless for most of us, obviously), I'm very impressed with the design.
This is the first time ever I've seen a laptop design that is not a total Apple rip-off and looks classy. At least it doesn't scream "compromise" like 99% of all other non-Apple laptops.
The screen is the only thing to like. If it had 256gb drive, 8gb RAM, and an i7, then I'd be a lot more likely to look at it (and install ubuntu on it).
Yes, it has a touch screen... do people actually like touch screens on their laptops? Is that worth such a huge premium for such mediocre hardware otherwise?
I love it but it's too niche and rich for my blood. I get the idea: A beautiful, super high-res touch display with keyboard running a Cloud OS. The only problem is for this dollar you're in Mac territory and while maybe you sacrifice touch display, you suddenly have far more robust hardware and local I/O. If money was no object, I'd get one in a heartbeat. But realistically...
It is a thing of beauty. It just seems uneconomical / impractical at this price point which is necessitated by the display.
Edit - I was going to suggest a PC laptop with touch display, that you could always install ChromeOS on in a boot partition, but your're just not going to get that resolution. This is for someone who wants a beautiful thin client above all else.
My theory is the Pixel is for corporate customers not consumers. Dramatically lower IT support costs since no local storage. Probably increased security as well. And this version takes care of the high end of that market.
This is actually ringing a bell in me right now. For such a high end Chromebook, without the ability to feasibly add in another OS, the price tag seems far out of reach for all the current offerings online with regard to what one may achieve.
In fact, I really won't be surprised if Google has a bag of online goodies under its table right now just waiting to be unveiled alongside with the launch of the Pixel. Unless they push with this, I just don't the current market place for such an expensive Chromebook. If Google does push forward a new set of online tools/cloud offerings, it might be groundbreaking.
I could see ChromeOS converging w/ Android into a single platform that allowed for android app emulation while running x86_64 apps natively.
I realize they're completely separate teams, but at what point do they converge to provide a greater value-add to the product?
What user is going to drop $1200 on a machine that only lets you browse the web? Unless GOOG plans on providing some large backend for virtualization or offloading CPU processing what's in it for the "power" user.
There's more to this than we're privy to. I don't see a user needing this kind of horse power for just cloud-based applications. That doesn't make sense.
The absolute best news about this computer is that it has a 4:3 screen, as it should be. This is the first 4:3 screen I have seen in a very long time. On top of that, it is a fantastic resolution. This is great news.
I completely agree with you here. fullscreen web doesn't really work in 16:10, even in portrait. It's among the reasons why I preferred my iPad to my Xoom for web browsing a couple years ago.
Now I wish you could switch to portrait on this one and still keep the keyboard.
Why didn't they just turn it into a tablet? The trackpad seems almost extraneous, and the keyboard could be an add-on. Not to mention the square form factor that makes it look bulkier than it really is.
One strong point for installing arbitrary Linux distros on the pixel is that the Intel linux gpu drivers are fully open source. The downside of the arm chrome book has been the Samsung binary blob
This is the Tesla roadster. It's an aspirational product for those who can afford it, those who wants to live in a brand new, and not quite ready for primetime, cutting edge world.
What I find rather shocking is that 10% of all UK laptops are Chromebooks. When and how did that happen? This is all while Apple is still dominating the Windows exodus!
I wonder if existing Chromebook users would want to pay for a Chromebook Pixel, or if they're content with what they have.I thought Chromebooks were about low price points, an alternative to expensive machines which people primarily used for web browsing. I guess there's going to some people who don't care about the number of gigabytes on their laptop. They just want sharp graphics and constant online access.
A retina Macbook Air would have higher virtual density and resolution. This is only 1280x850 vs 1440x900 if you assume a 2x scale factor the way retina does things. It is nice, but 32GB, thicker and only runs a browser limits it compared to everything else out there: macbooks, windows, linux... even tablets and phones have 64-128GB now for much less and can run Chrome.
Everyone is saying that you can easily turn this into a development machine with SSH or a web IDE like action.io ... but what if I don't have internet? You never leave your home?
What's the point of a mobile chromebook if I won't use it ouside my home or my workplace? And last time I checked there isn't open WiFi in the streets.
People are (correctly) pointing out that the consumer/pro value proposition is not really there.
I suspect this is a pure enterprise play for Google. Institutional customers who value the management features of the ChromeBook platform but want to give their employees something nicer than a $300 netbook with a laptop screen.
People really need to thanks Google for bringing up the competition all the time. Now Apple have little reason not to add support for retina, lte, multi touch display in the coming MBA models.
On the other hand, it is a little strange that Google didn't mention the weight of the Pixel.
This is pretty incredible. Not for me, but definitely a great product. I take issue only with the 32GB internal. I know it's a cloud device but it would be nice to be able to store some local videos to watch on that incredible screen. I guess that's what USB 3.0 is for, but still.
This promo video http://youtu.be/j-XTpdDDXiU looks and sounds like Apple's, apart from white backgrounds. Speech writing is the same, uses the same words like delightful, great, blah blah. Weird.
Interesting screen aspect ratio of 3:2, halfway between the 4:3 of yore and the nearly inescapable 16:9 widescreen. It seems like a nice compromise, better than 16:10 if height is important to you.
I wonder how long it will be before other manufacturers pick it up?
Why isn't there 8gb of ram? Even as a die hard apple user I still can't see why they didn't try and beat apple on such a simple and clear specification that when you spend all day in a web browser will help with how fast the device seems.
Forgot to mention - touchscreen on notebook laptops is useless - your arms get tired and your screen gets dirty very quickly.
Also: google are regular copycats.
I was surprised at how expensive this was seeing as how there is a $250 chromebook. It's a big step up in price and I don't see what the advantage of it over say a macbook pro would be.
Anyone notice how closely the video ad resembles an Apple ad? Come on google, how about a little originality? I'd love to try one of these out in person though.
I've never understood why Mark Shuttleworth and Cannonical never built a halo laptop for Ubuntu. If they knew this was in the works, it starts to make sense
Personally, I wish you could get one without the touchscreen. I understand people like touchscreens on tablets but I don't see the need for it on a laptop.
Well, its Chrome OS, so anything that runs on Chrome browser anywhere (including Native Client apps), plus additional apps using the Chrome OS-specific APIs.
> Chrome OS wasn't a touch based OS as far as I recall... have they integrated touch into the OS now?
Chrome browser (and, therefore, Chrome OS) has been integrating touch features for several versions. Since I don't use Chrome on touch devices (except Chrome on iOS, which is a different beast) I'm not that familiar with it, but my understanding was that the support was pretty far along by now.
Yes, the OS itself is touch enabled. Buttons and such are better designed for tapping, tabs are draggable, the status bar at the bottom can be pulled up with a swipe, etc.
You probably need to use the other modifier keys. But it's weird... it's not even a PC-101! I guess Google has really gone back to the roots... PC/XT or PC/AT :P
wrong direction..$250 should be the target for mass uptake. This is $1050 in the wrong direction...it's almost like they don't want mass uptake of this concept quite yet
Had a few friends who got invites and have one to play with for a month now.
Must say I'm somewhat feeling meh about this on many levels.
Initialy the price was a wake up and I thought, ok I'm missing something so I did a little digging and still think its too expensive for the sum of parts.
Issues I have are:
1) Price
2) Limited local storage
3) Only USB2 and no USB3
4) No 3g or 4G options in the UK and given the price I'd expect at least 3 years worth of unlimited 3G internet based up consumer prices and that spec.
5) battery life, is somewhat lacking
Concerns that may also be worries when I know more are:
1) Keyboard mic could be used to snarf passwords via applications that have access to the mic
2) No vents apparent and suspect hidden under the keyboard which is worrying in case of spill/splash
3) Screen mooted to have good viewing angles so more mindful to shoulder surfing
But in general for what you get it seems way too expensive and look forward to a teardown.
Now all that said Google did somewhat get burned on the Nexus 4 pricing and I don't know if they are over compensating or what. They may be releaseing at a silly price for those with more money to burn, then gradualy lower the price to fit all price pockets.
Another aspect a friend said was it has 1tb for 3 years cloud storage and whilst nice and with that local storage overly needed I do think such lockins to Google without being able to tap alternatives and cheaper alternatives distracting from the price. Remember Microsoft many years ago got lambasted for tieing in everybody to IE on windows as default and not offing a simple-janet-and-john alternative for the happy people. This ties in more than that, but different times.
When I factor all that it is and is not I still think if I had that money I would get a macbook air and I have never had Apple product and very much a google fan, but this is so over priced to me that it would be insane to buy one at that price, least for me.
I would also add that two wifi ipads with retina screens and a bluetooth keyboard works out cheaper and with that, it does somewhat again highlight the price factor.
So with all that I'll stick with my plans to get a Chromebook (cheap one) and probably get one even cheaper 2nd hand now :) that and my netbook with built in 3g modem and twice the battery life is still nothing to worry about.
I would like to see a resolution like this but with more storage, USB3, built in 3g modem (3G in the UK is faster than USA 4G and CDMA 4G with voice is a battery nightmare apparently as well as a kludge somewhat). Also at the very least twice that battery life.
So I will with for a tegra 4 version, which will make more sence on more levels.
For my mobile devices, I usually don't care a lot about the brand, and only slightly the costs - I simply get what best matches my needs.
I want all my data in the cloud + permanent access on a powerful device where I can do everything (ie I don't want something underpowered causing limitations).
The $150 difference for a minimal LTE connections makes this thing attractive - that means no need to look for wifi hotspots and then spend a minute to ask for the damn password to restaurant owners.
The 1TB cloud storage, if it can be shared with other computers at home, would just kill any need I have of Dropbox and others. That is also a big plus. If the cloud storage can somehow be used to host static websites with a custom domain name, I would also cancel at least 2 hosting accounts. (add some PostgreSQL capability and that'd be 3 hosting accounts I'd cancel)
BUT :
- 4Gb of RAM? Who though that it could be decent for a high-end laptop? 8Gb is the bare minimum I will consider. I will want to run heavy stuff on that thing if there is an i5 and a low battery life instead of an ARM. (heavy stuff: a gazillon tabs, editors, many pdf files, editing documents, cpu-hog websites doing pretty graphs like http://hdr.undp.org/en/data/trends/)
- 64 Gb of flash??? Really??? How will I get permanent access to my 1Tb of data if I'm in a place without LTE or WIFI ???
I purchased a 512 Gb SSD for my Macbook Air as soon as it was available on OWC, just because I can't stand the pain of missing some document or music or whatever
I don't want to care. I want my problems to be solved. 1Tb: ok, 64 Gb cache: fails.
As attractive as this chromebook may look like, I won't buy one because it is not solving all my problems - even if I'm one of these users who want everything in the cloud.
I want everything in the cloud but the online storage is only up to 1 Tb. I have more data that this, but ok, I can live with that minor limitation. However, I want a full backup locally accessible for whenever connectivity might be a problem.
If it is somehow possible to upgrade the RAM and the SSD (in the early days of Zaurus and Simpad, there were shops doing BGA reflow for such needs), and if for say $1000 more I can get than done and get at least 512 Gb of SSD and 8 Gb of ram, I may buy one.
1 Tb of SSD and 8 Gb of ram means I will buy one, but only if at this $1400+$1000=$2400 pricetag there are no better options to run Linux or OSX on similar hardware (1.5 kg, high res touch screen, slim laptop) - because I don't care about the brand.
These are a lot of conditions for me, so I'm not sure about what the market is for that thing. Certainly not me at least.
That shot is misleading because the air slopes down so much. the max thickness of each device is likely pretty similar, but the Air has a much slimmer average thickness.
The Air tapers across the width of the body to make the edges significantly narrower than the laptop is at its thickest point. Try looking at them both fully edge-on so you can see the Air's full profile.
The Verge says the touchscreen isn't really smooth though.
>And then there's the touchscreen. Google repeatedly told us how smooth and fluid it is to swipe through webpages on the touchscreen on the Pixel, and how it would enable developers to target a broader ecosystem for their apps by allowing their tablet and smartphone creations to have the same experience on the web. If only it were true: the touchscreen response is far from fluid, if Google's on-stage demos and our own hands-on impressions are any indication.
Perhaps this is a vanity product for the wealthy. But wealthy people are going to just surf the web on an iPad.
I really don't get this product.