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.
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.