I really wish i could find a use for the chromebooks for my family, but i failed. This one seems similar to the samsung chromebook, which i tried for a while (also lending it to mother, sister, children) but we all found it basically useless for any everyday task.
Surely one can blame the ecosystem; but still the conclusion does not change, and as a comparison, tablets and phones had a more successful approach at adapting or modifying the ecosystem and become usable.
You cannot use an arm chromebook as laptop because of lack of storage, applications, limited options to connect peripherals (no drivers for anything except storage). No way to print that occasional document or boarding pass (unless you have another computer or perhaps network enabled printer); no way to scan a document. The samsung had an SD slot (this one does not); but you could not show videos from your camera because of unavailable codecs (and no way to install them, despite plenty of android apps for arm that play the same formats).
Casual browsing also fails a lot because of unsupported codecs (flash, silverlight); a lot of chrome extensions do not work for arm. Apps, almost non existing.
Compared to a tablet, you get a keyboard and the ability to display multiple windows on screen; but in exchange you lose almost every other sensor or peripheral (accelerometer, gps, camera, light) which make the device useful.
Now if there were at least a sandbox to run android apps, one could (temporarily ?) address the lack of applications.
I'm kind of surprised. My dad is an over the road truck driver who isn't too tech savvy. The most I've ever been able to teach him to use on a computer is how to browse the web with Google Chrome. When he left to go back over the road, I got him a Samsung Chromebook with the built-in 3G and he loves it.
He plays his online Texas hold'em (flash based), looks up unfamiliar destinations on Google Maps to see the satellite imagery, and checks the weather radar regularly to avoid storms. He's also able to better keep in touch with us now that he can shoot off e-mails whenever he wants.
I had the exact opposite experience - our chromebook is used all the time while or tablet collects dust. Having a real keyboard is a big advantage. The features you list that a tablet has that the chromebook doesn't are all on our phones anyway.
We'll probably take the plunge and get one for someone in the family when the next wave come out. Most of our documents are in Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Docs, etc. We also have a RaspberryPi and PogoPlug serving up plenty of local network storage. The only printer we use now is an all-in-one with wifi and support for Apple AirPrint and Google Cloud Print. Scanning from it is a little trickier but it can also scan right to an SD card from the printer panel. I can't think of the last time anyone else in my family attached a USB peripheral other than a mouse or storage.
>> I really wish i could find a use for the chromebooks for my family
My family mostly browse the web. Actually, they don't call it the web. They call it facebook and google. This is the 99% use-case. For that matter, this laptop is perfect.
Ordered. I absolutely love my ARM-based Chromebook, and have wished for the same specs with a bit better construction and build quality. This is absolutely perfect for my needs, and the keyboard looks to be marginally better as well.
I've hardly touched my MB Air (2012 refurb) since I got the Chromebook. Small and light enough to throw in any bag/backpack without care, cheap enough to not worry about theft.
I don't mind it being the same CPU and RAM specs as the original; I don't need much for the Chrome browser and a SSH session to the beefy server where I do most of my work.
Also owned the C7 Chromebook for a while; upgraded it to SSD and 8G of RAM, but it felt like an abomination with the fans, heat it put out, etc. Sold it to a friend, who absolutely loves it.
I can understand buying a Chromebook instead of a Macbook Air, but I see lots of people saying that they have both yet still prefer the Chromebook. What is it that makes a Chromebook so much better than a Macbook that has vastly superior construction, better battery life, and significantly more power?
The Macbook air is small enough to take anywhere, and let me assure you, people will steal anything. Didn't Stallman's ridiculous 200MHZ laptop with a monochrome screen get stolen at an airport or something?
Chrome OS itself can't possibly be that compelling, so does this suggest that people just want a Macbook Air form-factor that runs Linux well?
I don't own either device, I'm just intrigued by the fact that so many people seem to be replacing Macbook Airs with them.
I have an rMBP and a Pixel. I actually prefer the Pixel most of the time - it's smaller and lighter while still packing a high-density display, has a fantastic build quality, and is just zippy. The built-in LTE radio is handy for when I'm out and about, too. The sleep/wake times are incredible (it's generally woken up before I've fully opened the lid), so it's trivially easy to just flip the lid closed, go somewhere, flip it open, and keep doing what I'm doing.
ChromeOS is perfectly functional for so many use cases (though not all of them). I do all my development on a Linux machine on my home network through SSH anyhow, so I can work at my Windows desktop, or pick up the Macbook or Chromebook and continue working easily. It actually outperforms the Macbook in regards to video (I can't watch fullscreen on the rMBP without it going all laggy).
I still go for the Macbook sometimes, but if I just need a portable terminal and browser, the Chromebook is perfect.
I think I could do about 80% of my online life with something like a Chromebook (I'm also looking forward to seeing what the ASUS T100 is all about). I just want something light to take with me for some note taking, email, watching videos, surfing the web. Mostly what I'd use a tablet for, except I need a keyboard to effectively communicate on the web. Some remoting to servers, etc....
I have a full 15" MBPRo, and it'd be nice to not lug that around on the weekends and such.
But then again, maybe we just get a Surface Pro 2 (or similar) and replace everything.
So many choices with how to manage your technology lifestyle now.
As to theft: I think the argument is that you care much less if the Chromebook gets stolen, not that it's much less likely to occur. It's a quarter of the price to replace, and you likely don't have any data on it that's not synced to cloud services.
I personally couldn't bring myself to switch to a Chromebook. My personal time on the computer constitutes ~25% coding and ~75% in the browser. If I did not code, ever, then I would probably invest in a Chromebook. Since I do, I'd prefer to have a Macbook Air or a similar machine.
My girlfriend, on the other hand, spends all of her time in the browser. All she does on the computer is write her papers, surfs the web and check her email/calendar. She could save nearly $700 by purchasing a Chromebook versus the 11" Macbook Air. The Chromebook fills a growing niche, the users who need more than a tablet, but less than a fully-blown desktop machine.
Not everyone is a webdev though. Try todo some C#, Java development (that basically require a decent IDE) or anything graphics related (games) via a remote connection and you will see its justs not there yet.
It's a good question and frankly I was quite surprised to realize, after using my chromebook for a while, that I was subconsciously turning to the chromebook rather than the macbook for browsing because the experience is just better. If you are looking for the least clunky way to browse the Web, it's not the Apple product (that was the surprise). Chrome OS boots faster and feels much lighter without all the icons and menus that you find in a regular OS.
The ARM chromebook also feels nicer because it has no fan. This simple detail makes it feel less like a computer and more like a tablet.
The most astonishing is that these two points give the ARM chromebook the edge over the macbook even despite its very poor screen.
That being said, I do occasionally turn to the macbook for in-browser work, when the low power of the ARM chromebook is too palpable.
For me personally Chrome OS is that compelling, that is what I like about Chromebooks. The browser, where I live 90% of the time on computers, is the default view in Chrome OS. And I get an extremely secure OS that acts as a dummy terminal to more powerful computers.
Exactly. I do all of my development in vim on a vm hosted elsewhere. A chromebook seems like the perfect 'dumb-terminal' for what I need. I'm mostly concerned about the screen resolution, so I'm tempted by the pixel, but it's more than I want to spend.
Basically, I love the concept of a computer that I don't have to setup, worry about backing up, etc. By using a remote VM, I get access to a more powerful machine that is backed up daily, and I won't misplace. This is the main advantage of "the cloud" (or whatever you want to call it) to me.
You can actually replace 1 Macbook Air with 4 Chromebooks
But more generally, most of the things most people do on a laptop can be (or are) done in the browser. You can even do image and video editing in the browser nowadays, as well as programming.
This entirely depends on each person's specific use case. It's not a black or white answer. Sure, the MBA is "better" - and more expensive - but it's also a case of the Chromebook being "good enough" for a lot of tasks where the MBA is overkill.
Also you can quickly wipe the thing before entering a situation where it might get lost/stolen/confiscated [1]. Then take 5 minutes to set it up again on the other end.
[1]: Such as:
- A sketchy neighborhood
- Leaving it at home while you're away for a long time
If they're after you in particular, yes. But the standards for seizure at the border are basically at the customs officer's discretion and requires no forethought or preparation. They can just decide you are suspicious and take your machine, making a copy if they like.
Also, you can encrypt all settings and history locally before syncing in ChromeOS. While that won't help your gmail account or search history, those are products you can much more easily use alternatives to while still using ChromeOS itself. That leaves you vulnerable pretty much only to the authorities forcing google to send you a corrupted update, which can't be trivial and is an even higher barrier protecting you from casual and dragnet snooping.
Many not-high-profile people are forced to turn over their electronics at the border on a regular basis. A device that you can wipe and restore once you're through customs is quite valid here.
Just curious, what are your use cases with it? I've been considering one as a cheap Linux dev box but it seems like installing a second OS is a pain and that there's little to no HD space left after doing so. I've been eyeing a Sony laptop that costs ~$370 bit it is quite bulky.
This. As much as I like Google, I've griped before that the Chromebook is a tempting but raw deal for a power user.
[1] You get a pretty locked down laptop that you have to boot into developer mode to do anything useful (which adds an additional 5-second boot time)
[2] I'm a happy camper at setting up dual-boot systems with Windows laptops, but crouton sounds like a pain to me.
[3] Limited disk space: I would think we would need at least a 64 GB or 128 GB SSD to do anything useful.
Note that I'm only speaking as a power-user. IMHO, the Chromebook is actually a great laptop for the older generation and people who use web-based products all the time ... but I do wish Google had put in some more though on how to make it useful for power users who need the Linux utilities as well as Eclipse, Thunderbird, and other X-based applications etc.
I really hate having to buy a good laptop that has Windows pre-installed and having to wipe it out just to install Ubuntu/variants, but it still is my only choice at this point. (Yes, I realize there are companies that produce pre-installed Linux laptops, but their build quality doesn't compare to the HP/Dell/Asus/Samsung kind.)
Note: not that I'm suggesting you get one, I'm just adding what I know. I've been tempted by the screen: the LTE version with a DigitalOcean SSD-based VM to do all the painful work (and completely disposable, my favorite part), combined with that screen for text editing, makes a lovely combination.
But, I just run Arch on a thinkpad. I still get a little kick when I boot a machine the first time I get it, try out the hardware to make sure it all works, get annoyed with windows being utterly awful, and then get to wipe it over. I might dd it with all zeroes first, depending on how annoying it was :-)
I find the 32GB Pixel more than adequate, but admittedly I am probably weird that way. The last time my primary computer happened to have 32GB was only 2007 and I've never really grown out of those usage patterns.
> IMHO, the Chromebook is actually a great laptop for the older generation and people who use web-based products all the time
I think a lot of us in the younger generation do this too, including the more tech savvy. I'm a software engineer in my 20s and my Chromebook is just fine for me 95% of the time. Sometimes I wish it had a little more RAM for when I get lazy about closing tabs, but that's about it: it's rare that I care about desktop apps.
Chromebooks are convenient if you fall on the lightweight side of the "power user" spectrum. With the help of Crouton, a chrooted "traditional" Linux environment is easy to set up. If all you need is Emacs, your command line utilities, and 10 gb of disk space for active development, then you would be surprised at how capable chromebooks are as lightweight development machines.
Yeah I have been wanting to pick a Chromebook up for exactly the same thing. I can imagine Arch with Awesome being great on one but it seems Google have made it a pain in the ass to get rid of Chrome OS and stick something else on. While I live in my browser I still work in a text editor/IDE and need a terminal with GCC and other bits. Lenovo have some nice portable machines but, like you said about the Sony, they are bulky.
I would love a Chromebook I could easily install a Linux distro on (I don't mind which, I can work within any distro quite happily although I would pick Debian if I had a choice) with a good 13" screen of 1440x900 (IPS). Don't care or want touch. A solid trackpad with multitouch. All the ports on the left (like this HP) as I am right handed an use a mouse to the right mostly so anything plugged in there gets in my way. A 128GB PCIe SSD. 8GB RAM. 8+ hour battery life. CPU I don't really mind but an Intel i3 would be the best (for me) due to compatibility with everything else. Backlit keyboard would be awesome. I am sure they could do all that for $500 or less. Even if I can't take Chrome OS off and have to dual boot that is fine with me as I quite like Chrome OS for a lot of things and only need a real OS for work. If anybody knows of such a machine please let me know!
Ok I am pushing it a bit with the 128GB SSD but if you stick a standard HDD in there they should be able to keep it at £500 or less quite easily. There are similar spec machines in the 15" range from Acer and others for that sort of price it would just mean scaling down to 13" :)
Seems like your best bet would be an Intel Chromebook like the Acer C7 - you can easily swap the SSD with bigger one, add RAM and install XFCE/Unity using one of the many options.
It has fans though and you will notice those! And the battery life isn't stellar. But at least it is cheap and relatively light weight and comes with USB ports.
The Acer C720 actually looks quite nice although AFAICT you still can't wipe and install your own OS? You have to use the same methods as we currently have like crouton.
That's right. Something to do with the different type of firmware used in the Chromebooks you couldn't install Windows on them. XFCE on ChromeOS is as close as you'll get.
I don't care about Windows but Chrome OS is based on Gentoo so why the hell can't I just install some other Linux distro like I do on any other computer? It annoys me that it is coming to the end of 2013 and I still can't get the kind of laptop I want running Linux. The closest I can get is the Dell XPS 13 DE but I don't want to run Ubuntu and people I know with them have found getting other distros to work well a pain in the ass. I don't know if things are any better now as I know Dell was trying to improve things for other distros by making drivers more available outside of Ubuntu.
This is a horrible time to buy this... Assuming Samsung's new Series 3 ARM Chromebook (Rumored Exynos 5420... "Eight core" CPU+Mali T628) keeps the same price this year ($250), then HP's model is left in the dust. No one should be buying a new Nexus 4, 10, or Chromebook until mid november if they want to have a cutting edge device.
Thanks for confirming. I'm a little boggled why HP would roll out an identical product an entire year after the fact, unless HP is just that messed up internally.
There are whole companies that exist entirely on their enterprise sales. So selling their own branded laptop to their clients makes sense even if it is a year behind Samsung.
Honestly, working for a business that buys enterprise devices, 1 year behind is stunningly good. Buying business Android devices with a bar code scanner there's something like a 7 year product life cycle so you get some stunningly old hardware, for example.
In some ways I wish Mark Hurd remained HPs CEO. I think they could have really competed with webOS in the long run (be a good 3rd/4th place, making sure the Apple and Google are actually innovating and not becoming a duopoly). Then again, we would never have had the fire sale, and I would never have had the pleasure of working on the Android port to the Touchpad.
I wish they kept Apotheker a bit longer... He had the real potential to be a bigger laughing stock of the technology circle than Ballmer.
This whole industry has always suffered from lack of viable competition. There never seems to be enough market to support third players, where we're lucky enough to even have 2 market leaders. sigh...
To be fair, the 5250 is perfectly adequate in last year's Chromebook, and since this model has the same sized screen, it should be totally sufficient. It has pretty good battery life, and charges quite quickly.
Unless the 5420 has better battery life characteristics, I'm not sure if it's actually a better processor for the Chromebook.
I bought an 11" ThinkPad X131 but quickly returned it because the viewing angles were woeful. The hallmark of a garbage spec panel is noticeable vertical shift even when looking at it dead on.
On one hand, the form factor and aesthetics are great. The price/power engineering is great. The mission/concept is fantastic.
On the other hand, we've learned something from Android/IOS. We need apps and they do not necessarily lead to a computer that cannot be managed by a below average user. Even the average 'your mother' has some needs that aren't well met by this machine. Skype. Fill out this (Word) form and email it back to me.
I really want android/ios-like (ideally iOS simplicity with chromebook prices/hardware) computers to come out and solve computing for the many many people poorly served by cheap clunky windows laptops.
I agree, but it doesn't make Chromebooks useless. Your average user just wants to be able to type and set a few basic formatting options in a WYSIWYG editor, which Google Docs easily provides.
Chromebooks are fine "Mom Machines" most of the time, or fine laptops to stash in your car in case of unanticipated need.
My opinion is that people need to stop attempting to conflate the market of true casuals, served by phones on the low end, tablets on the middle end, and netbooks like the Chromebook on the high end, with the market of serious users needing real desktop operating systems and applications, using laptops on the low end and high-powered desktops on the high end.
They are separate use cases, and we're best served if each segment focuses on itself instead of trying to be all things to all people. Manufacturers seem scared that if they don't provide it all, they'll be obsoleted, but I believe it's just the opposite; there's enough overlap in these markets to share (for instance, I have a smartphone, a tablet, a Chromebook, a real laptop, and multiple big huge desktops; certainly atypical, but normal people are fairly likely to have a smartphone, tablet or Chromebook, and a real laptop, and that's not going to change anytime soon). The paranoia is wasting a lot of our time.
yes, people who need their collection of macros or advanced mail merge are going to have trouble adapting to google docs.
but the original argument in this thread was that chromebooks couldn't do things that "your mother" needed to do. Google docs can't replace all the power-user features of MS Office. but that doesn't make a chromebook unsuitable for everybody.
A number? What are these exactly? I keep hearing people say this, but I can't think of any reasons where I would really need MS Office.
I haven't used Word since Word 97, and I have never come across a use case that Open/LibreOffice, Google docs or Latex couldn't solve for me. I would imagine that the same would apply for most people.
On the other hand, I remember collaborating on many reports using Google docs because that was the only application featuring decent real time multi user editing.
Serious spreadsheet users - the sort who run overnight calculations. For that job, Excel is simply the best there is. These people then make damn sure everyone else has MS Office too.
LibreOffice Calc sucks, but LO know it, and Kohei Yoshida is working very hard to make it not suck. LO 4.2 will be much faster. Then they just need to recreate VBA ...
Than LO? I'm sure there's stuff it does faster. Does it do Excel sheets more compatibly?
Or do you mean better than Excel? If it's better than Excel at the sort of sheet I mean, that's important news for the people who run such sheets - they'd be moving to Linux yesterday.
Gnumeric is better than LO and Excel for calculations. You can use several scripting languages (you can use Python, I use a functional, dynamic, term-rewriting language called Pure), it has more statistical functions built in, and is more accurate than Excel.
Regardless, it shouldn't matter what OS. Gnumeric runs on Windows, and I've had Excel running on Linux w/ Wine...
How is it as a replacement for Excel, though? By which I mean, shove in an OOXML spreadsheet with VBA in it. That is the use case that counts as a "substitute" for Excel for the users I'm talking about.
I personally think it's ridiculous that those are the terms people think in. If it's not exactly the same it's not as good, never mind the actual merits.
Thankfully the world is changing, MS products are no longer as essential as they once were. Excel really is the last holdout...
Technical document preparation. When you're dealing with stuff like tables, graphs, footnotes, appendices... Word makes it easier. I know there's probably a way to reproduce everything in Google Docs, but it's not as easy/automatic.
I don't recall printing anything else than boarding passes in years. Documents nowadays are written on a computer, and also shared and consumed on a computer.
And even those only when flying outside of Europe, as here we can use QR Codes on smartphone screen at the gate.
Even if you're really that set on using Microsoft Word, you can use Office Web Apps with Skydrive.
On the Skype front, until WebRTC is mature enough (soon), Microsoft is stuck using browser plugins if they release a Skype Web App. I'd say chances are near zero that they'd have a Chromebook compatible plugin. Complaining that Skype doesn't work on ChromeOS is like complaining that there's no Google Hangouts app for Windows Phone. The market share is too small to be worth the effort, unfortunately.
Now if Google would only open up Hangouts to video bridging solutions like www.bluejeans.com, www.vidyo.com (which.. is the tech powering google hangouts video), etc.
They've come far. They've done a great job. I don't think they've replaced the desktop though. I don't think the average user can go chrome only yet.
At some point an estate agent will send them a word doc and ask them to fill in some details and email it back. You and I can figure out how to get this going in google docs but the intended audience might have trouble. Google docs will encourage them to save it to the cloud and share instead of attaching which will confuse the estate agent. That doesn't mean Google's way is wrong, but in this scenario it does mean its harder and defeats the whole purpose.
Same problem with skype. If your friends/kids use skype, you will not be happy with a computer that can't do skype.
Basically, chrome needs to be compatible with the PC world and the way people are used to doing things. Compromise.
First of all, Google Hangouts replaces Skype, WebRTC eventually will too, and Google Docs or MS Office 365 are both perfectly good Office suites.
Second, the idea is simplicity. Anyone can maintain an up to date Chrome OS system. Anyone's grandmother could have an up to date, virus-free Chrome OS laptop.
Native apps? Chrome has Native Client. It's up to developers to make use of it. Not to mention technologies like Emscripten - again, up to developers. Anyone, what's out there on the web already is enough for most people.
If it's not enough, you can turn on developer mode, and run regular Linux apps (install with Portage), or install Ubuntu with Crouton.
Anyhow, Chrome OS solves 80% of use cases out of the box, and the rest with a little effort.
Google Hangouts is nice, but most/all of my clients use Skype and cant be bothered to switch. So while in theory not a big deal, in practice it kind of is. Even running Skype in a Linux enviroment is kind of a pain im afraid.
While the ubiquity of Skype is nice, I remember a time when people used other things. That might change someday as well. Either way, that's out of Google's hands, it's up to MS.
I've always found getting Skype running on Linux to be easy though (Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Arch are all trivial)...
If we have to have corporate oversight to get a decent OS, then I'd rather one I pay (e.g. Apple for iOS) than one I don't (e.g. Google for Android/Chrome OS). I want to be the customer, not the product being sold. Even if that's not what you want, choice is still a good thing: without choice, we have vendor lock-in and stagnation of ideas.
To pick an example, I think the mobile ecosystem would be a lot better right now were WebOS still a viable alternative. Instead HP left it to rot. How much progress did we lose there?
> If we have to have corporate oversight to get a decent OS, then I'd rather one I pay (e.g. Apple for iOS) than one I don't (e.g. Google for Android/Chrome OS). I want to be the customer, not the product being sold.
For branded Android/ChromeOS, AFAIK, you are paying Google for it the same way you pay for prebundled Windows. Insofar as the OS cost is discounted because you are an advertising target for Google, that's not that different from Windows PCs where the OS cost is offset because you are crapware target for third-party business partners of the system vendor.
And advertising revenue, isn't, I think, the only motivation for the low cost of consumer ChromeOS; low-cost consumer ChromeOS is the lever for building acceptance, knowledge base, and build a base of apps to motivate institutional sales of ChromeOS (sort of the way that getting Apple computers into schools was always a way to build commercial consumer and business markets for them.)
>I want to be the customer, not the product being sold
Sorry but this is not either or anymore. They will take your money and you will still be a product being sold. Just because you paid money doesn't mean they won't try to squeeze an extra penny off of your information if they can get away with it.
Don't talk shit on Android. It is FOSS, therefore it respects your 4 freedoms, unlike iOS, which you cited.
Agreed on Chrome OS. I'll stay with my cheap old Linux Thinkpad. My remote services run on my server at home anyway and they're pretty close to what Google offers, minus the sleek look (who cares, I'm functional).
"Don't talk shit on Android. It is FOSS" - is it? did you ever commit code to it? did anyone outside of google and other corp ever committed code to it?
MacOS is pretty darn good. I'd like to see them own the high end, and devices like this own the low end, squeezing Windows out of my life entirely. For "low end", this is a pretty darn good machine. And it would mean that everything is a Unix.
Google isn't a shining beacon of hope, but I do delight in seeing hurt put on closed ecosystems.
The Apple app store is a flat-out threat to human freedom. I do not want to live in a world where the only software available is the software approved by Apple and the governments that have jurisdiction over it.
edit: Note that I take no warmth in it being Google. Yes, they are closed. The good news is that HP just offered up "Not Intel" and "Not Microsoft" preloaded in a laptop form factor. The hardware companies are retreating to neutral corners and leaving the OS vendors to duke it out on their own. This is good for free software and good for the web.
Apple's app store is closed, yes; to call it a "flat-out threat to human freedom" is a bit extreme. Restricting some bits isn't an issue of human freedom; buy into a different ecosystem.
Google is the greatest machine for data gathering and mining in the history of humanity. (Perhaps the NSA or other 3-letter agency eclipses them, but in the private sector, no one outdoes them) Google's entire purpose for all they do is to get more information so they can show you ads. They have the capability (not the desire, I believe) to censor the Internet in monumental ways. (Imagine shaping search results based on political leanings that my search history suggests) They have a dossier of info on me they can turn over to whom they wish. (Probably won't, but a few public statements doesn't disprove the possibility) Which company, at face value, is "a flat-out threat to human freedom".
ChromeOS is pretty much closed. You don't have a say on what goes in, you don't have a say on what they're going to do with it, you don't have a say if they want to fully close most of it.
In fact, you can only see the parts they let you see (in ChromiumOS), and that is the only difference with Apple or Microsoft (albeit arguyably, Apple also open sources it's kernel)
This is not true, there isn't much in ChromeOS that's not in ChromiumOS. You can file bugs on crbug.com and they are positive of most requests. And of course you can fork at any time; Chromium is developed in the open.
While most of Google's services (and most SaaS providers) are closed, the web does enable freedom, and is still generally more open than the proprietary binary blobs people install onto their computers. Chromium is open source, Firefox is open source, and as long as the web itself is being advanced, we are more 'free', not locked into MS Windows, OSX, or even Linux or BSD.
Lets give up our freedoms to install programs, modify operating systems, write native code, use a programming language of choice, freely deploy native apps to users to get the freedom to consume media inside a browser sandbox.
Does developer mode come with a c/c++ compiler ? can you change the boot loader ? how about install a new shell ? replace the browser ? lets say you come up with a cool hack while in developer mode do you have to convince your friends to run in developer mode too ?
Chrome OS uses Gentoo's Portage package manager. So to install say, emacs, you simply do # emerge emacs, or whatever you want to install.
Anyhow, there's also plenty of online instructions on how to use Crouton to install Ubuntu onto Chrome OS, the point is that Chrome OS is a full, real Linux distro.
If it was endorsed by Google, you would have a user friendly way of doing that with full documentation, instead of hacks having to be explained by users via YouTube videos.
What rights do you give up by using an OS that is almost entirely open source? (keep in mind Linux has closed source parts too, some drivers for example)
If you dislike the paradigm that's fine, but don't claim it's hurting your freedom when
a) it's open source and
b) you can modify it the way you see fit.
Heck, you can change the Chromium OS source, recompile it and throw it on a Chromebook if you want...
Please, there's web caching, app manifests, and all sorts of other ways and standards to create web apps which run 100% on the user's machine. Applications need not be behind an SaaS wall anymore than video games need online DRM....
And Chrome OS absolutely IS an OS. The fact that it's centred conceptually around the Chromium browser and Google's proprietary bits doesn't make this less true.
Reminder: by living The Google Lifestyle of Google Docs, Google Mail, Google Search History, Google Bookmarks, Google Social Network, Google Driving History, Google Location Tracking, Google Thought Interface, you allow all that to be nicely indexed for quick handoff to third parties (improperly motivated employees, NSLs, etc) without your consent.
I'm pretty sure if you say "google" and "freedom" in front of RMS you'll get your head chopped off.
iOS gives you direct hardware access to the device so you can do photo editing, video editing, music production, high resolution high frame rate gaming, and dozens of other device-local tasks. How does a series of glorified web browser Googlebooks compete with that?
No one has written the next Photoshop yet, but the apps that need NaCl are using it. The SSH client, for example, which works great and actually lets me get a lot of work done from my Chromebook without even turning on developer mode.
I think Apple could continue to lose a pretty good amount of iOS share still and remain profitable, as the margin on their products is pretty crazy. Windows, on the other hand, is hugely important to Microsoft's bottom line.
This thing being blatantly aimed at the education market, Google really need to do the unthinkable and let people host their own server backends to support these devices, otherwise they're simply data sucking machines. That their own educational programming environment runs on a RaspPi and can't be hosted on a Chromebook speaks volumes.
And I have a Chromebook, which I'll freely admit is brilliant for many things, but they're always going to be slightly useless until running server apps on them is supported out of the box.
The whole thing is remarkably similar to the model Acorn, Sun and Oracle were aiming for with the NC back in the 90s.
Not quite - they're very dependent on your Google account, which is the login.
You can't run servers on the devices themselves, without something like crouton. They also miss features like Bonjour interoperability to make local service discovery just painful enough to force you into the cloud. The result of this is when you are away from the Internet, which happens way more often than a lot of people seem to believe, they become utterly useless.
The problem with Chrome OS is Google's larger strategic objectives are guiding their product direction. It seems like Android only became what it did thanks to Apple effectively forcing their hands, but as it stands Android on the same devices would be enormously more useful.
Awesome little machine but this brings up questions for me:
1. Do consumers want what is essentially a modern netbook? Didn't this market die once the iPad and tablets took hold?
It would seem from recent consumer buying trends that most prefer a touch screen/tablet form factor at this price point/screen size.
2. How does this compare to an Android tablet (Nexus 10) with a high quality keyboard? Or even some of the "transformer" products with keyboards/additional ports already available?
It seems you pay quite a premium for touch, I wonder if this machine will help sway people back into this form factor without touch/tablet mode.
As a Pixel owner I can confirm that touch on a laptop form factor is somewhat useless. There are precious few times I want to reach out to touch something instead of using the mouse.
The mouse really is a great tool. People need to stop trying to get rid of them.
I (27, UK) was at a hackathon late last year where there were schoolkids (~17). They were all developing on windows 8 laptops, one of them even had a surface, and they all had brand new nokia Windows Phones.
This initially freaked me out until I realised that they were all learning VB at school (shudder), and were just tooling up to use what they already knew. I was encouraged that one of them had had a look at another language (Perl, of all things) and encouraged him to take a look at Python instead; citing xkcd of course.
Anyway, they were all very excited by touchscreen laptops, and actually using them while trying to do development. It was weird.
This is interesting timing, as I am really considering purchasing a chromebook. There are a few things that I am still curious about:
1. does netflix work ? I know that there was some chromebooks that it did not work on.
2. Any one have any experience with playing flash videos?
3. If linux is put onto it using crouton or similar, is it a severly limit set of packages due to the architecture or does it run quiet well.
I want a very casual system that I can occasionally use for some writing/coding. I also have a VPS which I would ssh into for most (if not all) coding.
Netflix was enabled on the Samsung Chromebook last year thanks to EME (the HTML5 DRM stuff that was on the front page a few days ago) but sites like Hulu still might not work. I suspect that this device will work just as well, since the chipset is the same.
Flash works because Google maintains a NaCl version of Flash for Linux and ARM, but it's closed source and requires staying inside Chrome OS. If you install e.g. Ubuntu you won't be able to use Flash on Chromium on the same hardware.
I was in the US last month and went into a best buy to test out the latest Samsung Chromebook (using a similir ARM-based chip that the HP Chromebook 11 does) and I was surprised to find out that Flash worked incredibly well on it! I own one of the first intel-based chromebooks (also from Samsung, I don't remember the exact model name) and Flash is choppy, but on the new ARM-based chromebooks, it's great! And also, Netflix announced a couple months ago that they were planning on releasing an ARM-compatible chrome extension for Chromebooks. I don't know if it has been released or not yet, as it isn't compatible with my chromebook I think.
I think it's one of the best selling point for that Chromebook so far! It's so annoying to have to carry an extra power supply for a tiny portable laptop like the previous generation Chromebooks.
Killer feature for travel. Not only is this thing extremely light (lighter than the small air and zenbook), but you can save weight and space with a small usb charger and cable. Even if it is slower, that is a decent trade-off. I wonder if you can charge devices from the USB ports.
With that and the fanless design, IPS display, etc. This is looking pretty good. If could run a "real" linux distro without the hacks, it would be awesome.
EDIT: Although it has very few ports (no ethernet, HDMI) and a glossy screen, so that sucks
Woah, this is the kind of developing book I'd like:
6 hrs battery life
IPS viewing display (without 1080p!)
Mirousb universal charging cable
11 inch portability, weighing only 2lbs.
I have the acer c7 chromebook, and am really fustrated I can't simply trade it in for this chromebook. It really is one of the most appealing deals.
HN has also recently been talking about crouton, which I found very usable.
The biggest issues I see in this is 2.0 usb and that non-celeron processor.
For anybody considering developing on a chromebook, this looks like one of the most efficient chromebooks for you. A shame it doens't have a celeron though...
(Side note. I await installation for that IPS onto the acer. I may not be able to turn in the acer c7 for the hp, but if I can get ahold of that 11 inch IPS, I'm game for that :)
Why would you want an Intel chip in here? Would you rather get worse performance with half of the battery life? The only reason I can imagine is for installing linux and having the endless number of x86 precompiled applications. Even if that is the case, Ubuntu's ARM repositories have grown tremendously and ARM support is getting significantly better every kernel release. Plus, anything that isn't precompiled, you can always build yourself.
To be fair, battery life on Intel's Haswell i3's is comparable and performance is much better. As much as I like ARM rising up to the challenge of the high-end Intel monopoly, they're not even close yet (though getting closer every year).
That's precisely it: for developing 32 bit applications.
As it stands, I have many computers that could benefit from me programming a 32 bit application, but only my rpi could benefit (and my cell phone, I suppose) with the ARM builds.
32 bit is also helpful for me because I have some 32-bit IDE (like the naobot from Aldebaran IDE). It is simply easier for me to develop and configure.
You want to develop 32 bit applications? Well I would imagine you would want to develop them for (and why not on) the most widely used 32 bit ISA out there... ARM. ARM has had a 32-bit ISA and hardware using it since 1995, and is now moving to 64-bit with Aarch64. Thankfully, they are doing it a hell of a lot better than how Intel managed the transition back in ~2004-2006 with x86-64, even though they are almost 10 years late to the party. But by all means ARM is 32 bit.
Obviously you meant x86 every time you said 32 bit in your reply. While it is pretty pointless to get into a religious war over processor architectures, I think it should be noted that the base compiling tools such as GCC and now more advanced/cutting edge ones like LLVM/Clang have started to give developers platform independence with cross compiling. As long as the libraries used have support for whatever you want to compile to (and almost all current packages and major libraries have ARM support), you can cross compile to x86 and vice versa. While I'm not a Stallman level FOSS advocate, I do love the fact that having as many open components to software allows this application portability to be a lot easier.
Both Intel and ARM can work well in 32-bit, I don't see your point. On the contrary, if you're so hung up on the word size of your processor, ARM is a better fit than x86, since the latter is often running a 64-bit OS these days.
are you aware of the asus-1015? i got one recently, and it runs opensuse linux fine, has a celeron chip (appears to support virtualization, though i haven't tried yet; is missing some SIMD instructions that make matrix math slower), and similar size and screen to this (but it's fatter and plastic). i installed a 60GB ssd (comes with spinning disk; disassembly is somewhat painful; seems to fix any issue with the limited 2GB memory). not sure what the battery life is, but i wouldn't be surprised if it were close to 6 hours if you're not doing much heavy computing.
These things are getting increasingly more tempting. I'm actually in the market for something to give my parents, but I actually think an 11" screen is too small for them. 13" might be more like it, but in all honesty they probably still need a 15" machine.
But I'm getting increasingly close to picking up one of these just for the hell of it.
I'm typing on a 11" Samsung Chromebook right now and love it, though I never would have expected to be reporting that a year ago. At $140 for a refurbished model, I can take it on trips and not worry about theft.
The biggest trade-off is that I have to keep some of my number-crunching on a server that I ssh into, which does limit working from trains/planes/busses/etc.
My biggest gripe is that the method I'm using to run a proper linux environment (Crouton) creates a startup situation that risks blowing away my hard drive image if anyone but me opens the laptop and follows the "Press the Spacebar to exit Developer Mode" (or whatever it says) message.
I really hope Google realizes they've got a community of programmers using Chromebooks as trip-friendly development machines and creates proper support for dual booting (or chrooting) into linux.
I managed to move most of my development to an offline Samsung Chromebook; depending what work you do (mine is coding and writing) the Chromebook is lovely. Especially the battery life and the price.
My dad loves his Chromebook. TBH he's older and gets confused pretty easily and I don't think I'd trust him to keep even a Mac free of malware. It's basically only either a thin client or an iPad, and we already FaceTime on his iPhone, so dropping the Apple Tax on another iOS device (that doesn't come with a keyboard) doesn't make sense when Chromebooks are so cheap.
I'm also considering a Chromebook for my dad. He's quite computer literate but not really happy with his Win8 laptop.
A Chromebook would serve all his writing/email/browsing needs, but the only question I have is about USB peripherals - can you plug your digital camera in and have it pop up with all the pictures? And then a nice easy workflow to upload to google drive?
I picked one up for household use when I moved my home office to a secluded corner of the basement. Both me and my wife love the samsung chromebook. It was cheap and it just works for 99% of everything we need to do on a computer. I still have my desktop in my office that I work on and we use if we need to do some publishing work ( Inkscape, Gimp, ... ), but I have been extremely happy with my purchase.
I think the low end chromebooks are very diff from the high end.
the one linked here is basically a netbook that doesn't run windows but chromeos instead (ie you can only use chrome stuff). 4GB of ram and 16GB of ssd, low rez, slow cpu, it's pretty crappy ;-)
The high end has good specs - even thus it runs chrome os, at least, it'd make sense to convert it to windows or linux if chrome os was too limited. It's also a lot faster.
The HP Chromebook 14 should be available soon for $299. despite the bigger screen it's still only a 1366x768 resolution which makes it useless for me, but i'm thinking of picking one up for my parents.
Initial impressions (probably all negative): What's the deal with "Just because it looks cool?" A 640x480 webcam in 2013 seems kinda sad (people have become obsessed with video chats these days, quality matters). Using stylized curse words in the copy? Childish. The font on the page is way too small—people have big screens and bad eyes (plus, lots of words/details/reading trying to figure out what/why this things exists).
What's the advantage of this thing over a tablet with an external keyboard?
> What's the advantage of this thing over a tablet with an external keyboard?
Am I the only one who sits on a couch anymore? There's no way I'm juggling a tablet, something to prop it upright with, and a bluetooth keyboard in my lap all at once.
It's $233.89 according to that Amazon link, the $385 is crossed out.
Edit: The price has dramatically changed since both of us viewed the page. My comment is no longer valid. The current 7:50AM PST 10/8/13 price is $279.99.
I like the fact it uses a microusb charger but they removed all the other ports I wanted, like HDMI, Ethernet, VGA and sd. I was planning on getting an Acer C7 and this won't change that.
I have a personal distrust towards HP products. Their customer service has always been good to me, but I've owned 3 separate HP laptops (from before and after the Compaq merger) and all three have essentially fallen apart after the first 12 - 18 months. Same goes for Toshiba (2 laptops). In comparison, every thinkpad I've owned (3) has always outlasted my need for them due to outdated specs over time.
Strange that Samsung hasn't released their new ARM Chromebook yet, but this looks pretty good either way. I would've expected a quad core A15, bigger battery, and 4 GB of RAM at this point, though, for that price. Hopefully next year we can see some 1080p IPS panels, in there, too, for sub $300.
The GPU is still an ARM Mali T6xx which is mostly unsupported, i.e. removing Chrome OS and running "pure" linux is going to be dreadfully slow for lack of 2D/3D acceleration. It's a shame that ARM hasn't released any technical datasheets for their Mali GPUs.
FYI, this page only links to Amazon which says shipping on the 20th - but if you go to the Google Play Store and Devices, it's there in multiple colors (black, or white w/accents) and ships by the 11th.
Has anybody used Evernote on Chrome OS at all? I see so many people in lectures with a Macbook solely to use Evernote, and I can see why - it's great for notes on that platform at least. I don't want to take my laptop because it's too heavy and slow, but this (or some other Chrome OS device) looks great if Evernote does well on it - student price, light and fast.
I hoped that with products like the iPad and Chromebook Pixel we'd get back to taller screens again, at least 16:10. 1366 x 768 is not something I want to go back to.
I totally agree. I own a Samsung Chromebook and even if i'm able to get a lot of work done with it and that it's absolutely a blessing to carry around (i'm a CS student) the screen isn't suited for long work session unless you want to go blind...
Exactly. I know Google's market is primarily the US, but people in the rest of the world mostly read the same news, and get excited about the same products, but then they are unable to get them. Which is kind of depressing.
I have a chromebook at home and it has replaced my "serious" laptop almost entirely. Everything I do at home other than games can be done on the chromebook and it's so light and fast to boot I don't bother even opening a browser on my big laptop. Everything done in the browser gets done on my chromebook and only when I want to play games / use windows-only software do I boot up my other laptop.
I have the first gen samsung chromebook, that was priced at I think around ~350$. It's getting old and slow, but I still prefer it to my i7 laptop. It's all flimsy plastic and the power jack is starting to give up, but I'm going to use it till it gives its last breath.
I can't do anything more than 'consume content' with a tablet; not without adding an external keyboard, at which point you're basically creating your own chromebook type thing anyway. Recently I got the Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu, and that actually reduces my tablet usage a lot: when reading with a tablet, on, say, a site such as this one, I invariably end up wanting to reply but loathing/dreading the thought of typing stuff in on the screen which is S....L....O...........W. With the new computer, which is more comfortable and portable than what I had before, I can just use a real computer rather than the tablet.
What sort of casual work would be better on a tablet than on the chromebook? Answering emails would be better with a dedicated keyboard, as would navigating in a web browser.
For casual use otherwise (movies, books, angrybirds/candy crush style games), then a tablet is probably a better tool.
What about casual programming? Still kind of a sore spot for tablets - if I'm wrong, please tell me why! If I could just do simple emacs/bash stuff with perl/python/javascript/html and maybe even C/C++ I'd be a lot happier buying a tablet. Not really sure if you can do this with a chromebook either, though. Can it run a modern linux distro?
I run Crouton with Ubuntu Raring. Javascript/HTML/CSS dev you can even do under Chrome with some web IDE; the rest works fine under Crouton. There are just a few 'exotic' things you won't get working; for instance GHCi is broken on Raring ARM.
It's probably not quite what you're looking for, but I've been experimenting recently with using the Prompt app from Panic on my iPad Mini to SSH to a Debian virtual machine on Joyent (I have some spare credit with them I wanted to put to use up). For me, using VIM this way works pretty well, especially when paired with a bluetooth keyboard.
4*4Gbit=16Gbit=2GB. Basically it has one RAM module made up of four 4 Gbit chips. Someone just copy and pasted the technical spec sheet for the RAM module.
The thing I love about this device is that it charges off a micro-USB port -- buying a spare charger for my Samsung Chromebook was an expensive ordeal.
*100GB of free storage for two years, starting on the date you redeem the Drive offer.
Some things like Hangouts, voice search and auto updates obviously require internet.
Screen images simulated. Color availability may vary.
my problem is still that (absent paying exorbanent fees for 3G/LTE data), I still can't guarantee that I will be able to get online every time I want to use my computer.
Surely one can blame the ecosystem; but still the conclusion does not change, and as a comparison, tablets and phones had a more successful approach at adapting or modifying the ecosystem and become usable.
You cannot use an arm chromebook as laptop because of lack of storage, applications, limited options to connect peripherals (no drivers for anything except storage). No way to print that occasional document or boarding pass (unless you have another computer or perhaps network enabled printer); no way to scan a document. The samsung had an SD slot (this one does not); but you could not show videos from your camera because of unavailable codecs (and no way to install them, despite plenty of android apps for arm that play the same formats).
Casual browsing also fails a lot because of unsupported codecs (flash, silverlight); a lot of chrome extensions do not work for arm. Apps, almost non existing.
Compared to a tablet, you get a keyboard and the ability to display multiple windows on screen; but in exchange you lose almost every other sensor or peripheral (accelerometer, gps, camera, light) which make the device useful.
Now if there were at least a sandbox to run android apps, one could (temporarily ?) address the lack of applications.