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At $250, New Chromebook Means Competition For Tablets, Netbooks, Ultrabooks
Google's new ARM-powered Chromebook isn't a lot of things: it isn't a full-fledged laptop, it's not a tablet (doesn't even have a touch screen); and by design it's not very good as a stand-alone device. Eric Lai at ZDNet, though, thinks Chromebooks are (with the price drop that accompanies the newest version) a good fit for business customers, at least "for white-collar employees and other workers who rarely stray away from their corporate campus and its Wi-Fi network." Lai lists some interesting large-scale rollouts with Chromebooks, including 19,000 of them in a South Carolina school district. Schools probably especially like the control that ChromeOS means for the laptops they administer. For those who'd like to have a more conventional but still lightweight ARM laptop, I wonder how quickly the ARM variant of Ubuntu will land on the new version. (Looks like I'm not the only one to leap to that thought.)
so what?!
How is this different from any generic netbook that comes out around the same price range (with a x86 processor may I add)?
The really cool think here is that we're seeing the impact of Moore's Law in new direction. ARM-based hardware in its various guises (cheap notebooks, tablets and smartphones) has ushered in a wave of inexpensive machines that has been made possible by the availability of incredibly cheap chipsets that are just good enough for the task at hand at prices that are absolutely astounding (I remember carrying a work-issued laptop in 1996 that cost almost $3,000).
A real Linux distro is where it is at.
The big advantage over other ARM based netbook hacks is that this one has a driver accelerated X (since ChromeOS is just a Linux distro) and not just some Android graphics driver.
Too bad it looks like they won't be selling them in Australia.
1st thing I thought when reading about these was "will I be able to put another OS on it". I have very little interest in ChromeOS, but Android, linux, or even Windows RT, and now you've got my attention.
Evidently, the new Chromebooks don't have a physical dev mode switch (the old ones used to break a lot), but can be put into dev mode via a firmware switch. The price and combination of expansion ports (USB 3.0, HDMI, etc.), make this a pretty appealing target for hacking, although the ARM architecture means that lots of software will have to be recompiled, as the original post mentions.
"it isn't a full-fledged laptop, it's not a tablet (doesn't even have a touch screen); and by design it's not very good as a stand-alone device."
So....it's a crappy piece of tech? I don't get who they expect to market this to. Business customers? Really? Pipe dream if you ask me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDs7F4x3Dyo
Stop, drop, shut it down google non stop
Oh, no
That's how Ruff Ryders scroll...
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
call me when it's $100. At $250 I can wait for Black Friday and get a 15.6" i3 with Win 7 Home. Heck, I can buy one of those right no for another $100. Maybe if the packaging was sleeker I could get behind it (e.g. all titanium and whatnot).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The cost per unit of this sort of hardware isn't a lot and they only have to sell a few thousand to get their development costs back.
19,000 of them in a South Carolina school district.
I foresee a lot of downtime in the classroom each time there is a glitch in the the school's wifi or network.
What is the advantage of a Chromebook over a netbook? I could get a low-end netbook, with Windows included and the possibility of installing a good Linux distro, for the same price.
as long as you have a good network link and you better hope it's cap free and don't even think of roaming as it can cost $10 or more pre MEG!!
The cost per unit of this sort of hardware isn't a lot and they only have to sell a few thousand to get their development costs back.
We lose money on each unit but we make it up by selling in volume.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Given that a Chromebook works best when on a network, at least it should get the network stuff right. Right?
VPN - does it support, say, Cisco AnyConnect? No.
Kerberos? Not that I can tell.
Printing? Sure, if my organization is willing to install "Google Cloud Print Connector".
Baslcally, this thing might work fine if your entire business runs in the Google universe. Otherwise, get a netbook.
Lotta people who haven't even seen it yet are sure rendering authoritative opinions. Me thinks the proper thing to do is to wait and see and decide for myself, or at least to talk to someone with real experience. I like Googles stuff in general and hope I would like their Chromebook and the Chrome O/S as well.
Can it mount an external USB drive?
Can it play flac audio?
Can it route audio to a USB DAC?
Remember 2008, when the future was supposedly going to be Web Apps? Back then, we were to believe that native development was going to die and the future was applications programmed in HTML5, running on JIT-based JavaScript interpreters inside the web browser.
Since then, App Stores materialized and proven to be highly successful. Developers have again and again refused to develop their apps in HTML5 and clearly preferred to go native.
Apple, added an App Store to OSX, Android and Blackberry did the same and Microsoft is also going the same way with Windows 8.
So, ChromeOS is based on a premise that didn't really catch on. I can't blame Google for insisting on this since the web is their main source of revenue, but at this point they should just adapt the highly successful Android OS to handle the Desktop metaphor and forget about Web Apps. It didn't work.
Same should apply to Firefox and their Firefox OS..
its arm so it wont run the applications I want
its slow and light on ram
it requires me to be attached to the internet to access my storage
its got a shit camera (640x480? really? my 5 year old free phone has a 1.2mp camera douche)
its not even all that good on battery life
why is this compelling?
I will take a dozen if they come with a desktop optimized (mouse and physical keyboard) UI option for Android, an Android desktop section in the app market, and open source drivers.
So other than zero corporate use and how it's not much cheaper than a netbook which, as a sector of the market died more than a year ago and it's nowhere near high powered enough for most actual use that's not browsing, I don't see a single thing wrong with it.
I'm pretty certain you meant to be funny there but it's not as strange as it sounds. By selling in volume, you get a LOT of devices out there which can be used for money generation in other ways. Haven't you ever wondered how Google makes money despite the fact that their flagship product (search) is free to use (as are quite a few of their other products)?
""for white-collar employees and other workers who rarely stray away from their corporate campus and its Wi-Fi network." "
Cool, what version of IE does it run?
no thanks.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/samsung-chromebook.html#specs
Er, so where /are/ the specs?
How much RAM does this have so I can compare it to other netbooks to toss Linux on?
I bought an asus transformer prime rather than something like this thinking it would be better because it has a browser p.us the whole android Ecosystem and could easily be detached from the keyboard to be a tablet. However I have found the browsers to be incredibly slow compared to laptops or even an iPad. Not sure why this is the case, I'd expect the browser app to be super snappy as it would probably be the most used, but it just wasn't the case. I downloaded Chrome on it as well and it ran worse. I was quite surprised I must say. Side note, does things like Hulu and Netflix work on these?
Just slap Gentoo on it...?
They make their money through advertising. It's not really a secret.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
It's a race to the bottom.
They make the revenue by giving up your location and what you do. After all: this is Google we're talking about. Between Adsense and Google apps you use, there are no secrets. At.All.
People pay for your secrets, so buyers get a nebbishy netbook wannabe, and think they're getting a deal. Yeeeesh.
Like smartphones, they can sell it at or under cost and make money on the back-end.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
And bring back the IBM PC Jr !! If you don't like the keyboard, you can eat those keys !! NOTHING speaks of quality like chicklet keys !! Way to go, Google !!
10" ARM Android netbooks are retailing from $100-150 in China, so I'd say Google have a bit of room to earn money on their Chromebooks.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I don't want to keep my data in "The Cloud"
I keep my data on (micro)SD cards
Does it have a (micro)SD slot?
I suspect that very few typical users actually work offline much.
A passenger on a bus or in a carpool who doesn't subscribe to mobile broadband is working offline. Someone driving a car is not. I wonder to what extent the lack of offline use speaks to the inadequacy of public transit and carpool arrangement in some U.S. cities.
Access to the web, email and social media pretty well requires a connection.
Access to web and e-mail at least requires a connection but not a persistent connection. POP3 or IMAP e-mail can be downloaded while online, read and replied to while offline, and sent through your SMTP MSA while online. The Pocket add-on for Firefox extends this use case to the web: download several pages to read offline, and clicking a link in a web page adds it to your offline list for downloading the next time you connect.
It's a race to the bottom.
They make the revenue by giving up your location and what you do. After all: this is Google we're talking about. Between Adsense and Google apps you use, there are no secrets. At.All.
People pay for your secrets, so buyers get a nebbishy netbook wannabe, and think they're getting a deal. Yeeeesh.
Like smartphones, they can sell it at or under cost and make money on the back-end.
Race to the bottom is just how capitalism works. Its why Apples [who make siri useless with advertising] market share in phones continues to drop. Google will never give away your secrets, because it is not a good business model. They sell advertising space.
the kiddies aren't going to be doing much research, email, collaboration, whatever without a network connection in any case.
Since when does mail require a continuous connection to the Internet? I thought the use case for a store-and-forward system like Internet mail was to download mail, go offline, read, reply, go online, and send everything in the outbox.
Maybe I'm missing something.
This does not run the most popular applications, and without an internet connection, it's a paper-weight.
Can we stop using this word for a place of work? Part of the immaturity of the IT culture.
they only have to sell a few thousand to get their development costs back
Did you just grossly underestimate how much the care and feeding of a department full of Googlers and associated hangers on actually costs?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
A lawyer that read slashdot and blogs!!! Everyone Run!!!!!
No they make it with a small but real profit margin AND advertising.
I think you just grossly overestimated how many people are involved in a fringe project. It's not as if they are making hardware that wildly differs from anything else and it's the same with the software.
Some people may get the impression I was talking about google in general instead of just this project. I think this will be in the range of taking $100 ARM netbook hardware, putting ChromeOS on it, and selling for around $300. They don't have to sell millions to get a sunk cost back in that situation.
For $200 if bought a 10.1 inch netbook that seems like good value.
It works great for watching movies on the bus/train when on vacation (or in a hotel, thanks to HDMI and VGA out), occasional work when commuting, and of course sitting next to the couch to fact-check the rubbish that passes for TV news. It's an Asus eeepc "Flare" that I bought right off the shelf at Best Buy. When I get the chance it'll need some more RAM, so I might have to spend another $20.
I can see the value of these things for large companies or schools that can remote administer and secure large numbers of machines, but for home users these would seem to be a fringe item.
sustainable living
.
I've got a lot of specifics in by firefox setup and I hate it when I liveboot and need to reconfigure all my browser specs and reinstall all my addons, so I personally have a couple of preset settings for my iceweasel preferences that I keep saved as tar.bz2 files on my live-boot Knoppix usb-stick:
.
I generated the pref-tars in my home directory with
tar c .mozilla | bzip2 > m.tar.bz2
and have a setup.sh file called at boot-up which cd's to the home directory and runs
tar xvjf /path-to-stick/prefs/m.tar.bz2
There's no reason that you couldn't back up your browserprefs.tar.bz2 file somewhere on a server.
"sell a few thousand"? How much money do you think they've spent developing all of the software running on this device? I bet it's several million dollars at the bare minimum - which represents infrastructure, plus a modestly sized dev/qa team's salaries.
Assuming 5 million in dev costs (a VERY low estimate for all of the costs that go into designing a piece of hardware & the software that runs on it), and 5000 units sold, they'd have to make $1000 in PROFIT per unit sold to recoup their dev costs.
So either you fail at basic math, or you fail at basic cost estimating. Which is it?
"but I really don't understand why people don't just install Ubuntu or something."
According to the usual random Google sources, the new Chromebook appears to be running a Samsung-branded System-on-a-Chip called "Exynos 5 Dual Processor" (http://www.chromestory.com/2012/10/googles-new-249-chromebook-complete-specs/).
A quick check at Wikipedia showed that Exynos is composed of a 1.7 GHz Dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU and ARM Mali-T604 GPU (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos#List_of_Exynos_SoC). If I remember correctly, opensource support for the Mail GPU is a work-in-progress. So unless Ubuntu has the same OEM-level access to the binary drivers, running Unity on the Chromebook will be a painfully slow, framebuffer-only experience.
However if your idea of a window manager consists of terminal sessions running Links, Mutt, and Bash, this would make a mighty fine Emacsbook.
They are the screen, the battery, the SSD, the toucpad, and the keyboard in that order.
You need to read "The Innovators Dilemma" to understand why, regardless of capacity, the bottom end hard drive is always the same price. The same is true for laptops.
While it's true you could produce 4MB hard drives in volume for practically dirt cheap, you can't buy them for that price because no one is producing them in volume.
The saddle point for the low end machine is $300 today, and will be $300 tomorrow. The only thing that's going to change that is a "carrier subsidy", also know as a "payment plan" -- for which the price ends up being approximately, you guess it, $300.
What the market is willing to pay for a low end laptop dictates the lowest price you can offer any similar device at, regardless; anything else pushes you above the saddle.
You get a boot-bitch screen which says "you are in developer mode", and get to wait 30 seconds for it to go away, or you need a human being to hit a key combo to bypass the wait.
A lot of people bitch about this because what they really want is a Linux or Windows machine with free wireless access for a limited amount of wireless per month. Let them buy their own machine, or pay for their wireless access themselves (this is why Cr-48 Chromebooks were so popular, since there was a standard BIOS you could flash onto it in order to get rid of the wait).
Well below the saddle point for the cheapest components you can possibly buy to build a laptop equivalent out of, since to get lower prices, you have to get quantity, and to get quantity, you have to fit into an existing price point, and to fit into an existing price point, you have to fit into an existing profit model.
No profit = no product.
Read "The Innovators Dilemma" to achieve more clue.
Start with the Java it requires in order to run the client. Then move onto the licensing that prohibits redistribution of the client, and therefore the client can not be signed code, and then move onto the known replay attack CERT advisories for the Cisco VPN system itself.
However to google the repeated cost is about 1/3 of the "saddle point" so they don't have to sell a lot of units to cover the sunk cost and make a decent profit.
I still remember you Palm Foleooooo!
I can see it completing against tablets (low to mid range not your Apples or high-end Samsungs) and netbooks but surely it is in a different market to ultrabooks?
Will google now think of the children? They blocked my sons gmail address after finding out about his age. Is he allowed to use this book (I assume it works best while logged in with google for extra storage etc)
Wake me up when the platform doesn't favor a bunch of binary blobs that moot the ability to change the firmware.
At least with the Intel platform you don't have that issue.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Obviously "a few" is a number larger than five. Do you honestly think they will only sell 5000, or even only 50,000 of these globally? You don't? Then stop pretending I'm a strawman that thinks that and consider realistic numbers instead.
Bundling OS with browser - GOOD. doubleplusgood, in fact.
"sell a few thousand"? How much money do you think they've spent developing all of the software running on this device? I bet it's several million dollars at the bare minimum - which represents infrastructure, plus a modestly sized dev/qa team's salaries.
The 'software running on this device' is the Linux kernel, developed at no cost to Google[1]; some Linux user-space programs, also developed at no cost to Google; and the Chrome browser, which Google is developing anyway, so no additional cost to Google. The only costs of 'Chrome OS' are a teensie bit of integration and some testing - and frankly I could do that in under six months of my time, so of the order of US$100,000.
[1] Yes, I know Google makes a considerable contribution to the Linux kernel; but that contribution is not really a cost to the ChromeOS project, it's much more a cost of Google's core infrastructure.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I want RiscOs on that!
To post something more meaningful. I think RiscOS, missed a great opportunity here years ago. They should have moved to a Linux kernel/riscos userland approach when it could have still made a difference.
This is fairly obviously a re-hash of the old "dumb terminal" idea that does the rounds every ten or fifteen years.
In the past the big issue has been "we'd need to re-structure an awful lot of backend IT in order to actually use these dumb terminals, and they're not that much cheaper". This probably remains an issue for large businesses, but for smaller organisations that are buying in most of their IT (and quite often buying it in in the form of web-based systems that they pay a monthly fee for), I wonder if this makes more sense.
In the past you'd probably sell them a machine running Small Business Server, add all their PCs to the domain and charge for ongoing support, but as SBS is basically being retired this leaves the door open for Google. After all, if the server's on its last legs and the replacement will necessitate moving some or all of the infrastructure to an online service anyway, why does it have to be Microsoft's?
... more like. i'll pass thanks.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Well...Great Info
If I configure my browser 'correctly,, does can and does google still do this? I'm genuinely interested.
We strongly disagree. Not the part of various ecosystems, rather, the mind-boggling amount of privacy robbed of smartphone owners.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Google makes its revenue from Adsense, which relies on knowing about you. No Adsense, no Google. They have claimed to be the good guys, but in litigation after settlement, they proven that they constantly overreach, pushing boundaries farther and farther..
I cannot cite empirical data that says that the browser will behave. However, you'll need to have a non-google browser to test this. More: your presence online will give up much information on your behavior, your location, and the cookies will give tracking data to both organizations you visit, but also to scripts that attempt to read the cookies and extract private information.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
http://software.intel.com/partner/search-detail?companyguid=8cf91268-995e-e011-95a1-0050568d2e6c
Google's new ARM-powered Chromebook isn't a lot of things: it isn't a full-fledged laptop, it's not a tablet (doesn't even have a touch screen); and by design it's not very good as a stand-alone device. Eric Lai at ZDNet, though, thinks Chromebooks are (with the price drop that accompanies the newest version) a good fit for business customers, at least "for white-collar employees and other workers who rarely stray away from their corporate campus and its Wi-Fi network." Lai lists some interesting large-scale rollouts with Chromebooks, including 19,000 of them in a South Carolina school district. Schools probably especially like the control that ChromeOS means for the laptops they administer.
In other words, no one would voluntarily choose to use a Chromebook over a real laptop, but there is a good chance that they will be shoved down people's throats in various environments by control freaks. (Dumb control freaks who distrust their own employees/students, but apparently trust Google completely to not abuse their data.)
This may get Google some sales, but probably not as many as they think: legacy lock-in is powerful, and most businesses and other group environments have at least one program they need to use that only runs on Windows. (Wake me up when a Chromebook can run Photoshop.) But it may hurt their business in other ways. Does Google really want the reputation of the company whose products you use because you have to? Isn't that what Microsoft has been trying to get away from?
Yours is a fantastic point that illustrates the faults of the cloud very well. But, I think your post may have been a little too subtle for the average Slashdotter to follow. These days, you've got to spell it out for them.
That hasn't been the use case since dial up.
Use cases from the dial-up era are still useful for people who commute using public transit or carpool, where there may not be an available mobile hotspot.
Everyone else either uses their phone
"Everyone" appears to have been an exaggeration. My phone is a flip phone on a prepaid plan that costs me per year what a typical smartphone subscriber in this country pays per month. But then I'm thrifty, and thrifty people are edge cases.
or uses webmail
The article is about webmail gaining the ability to work offline using HTML5 technologies such as application cache and local storage.
Facebook
I graduated and lost my .edu address before there was a Facebook.
Can't really match the power of an Ultrabook/MacBook Air with latest Intel chips
ASUS discontinued their entire netbook line on September 4, 2012.
Low cost netbooks with large hard drives interfered with the "lock users into the cloud then raise the price and make ads more intrusive" strategy of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.
The advantage is that, when spending the $119.76 that it costs to buy the two years of 100GB of Google Drive storage, you have the option to spend an extra $129.24 to get an ARM-powered ChromeOS netbook to go with the storage. You aren't just buying hardware for $249, you are buying a hardware+service bundle that's almost equal parts "hardware" and "service".
Since you're buying a hardware and online storage bundle where nearly half the retail cost ($119.76 of $249) is the retail cost of the 100GB/2yrs online storage that is included, that's hardly surprising. If you aren't interested in the part that makes up that much of the value of the overall package, its probably not for you.
Sure, your joking ... but that's pretty much true. The $249 price of the Chromebook includes $119.76 (100GB @ $4.99/mo * 24mo) of Google Drive storage. So, the big difference between what you get for $250 with the Chromebook and a "similarly priced" netbook is, indeed, "the cloud".
Think of the hardware as a $129.24 optional add-on to 2 years of 100GB of Google Drive storage.
Google will never give away your secrets, because it is not a good business model. They sell advertising space.
You mean: Google doesn't currently give away your secrets, because it doesn't make business sense right now.
Even if I were given a free chromebook I would not use it. There is no hole in the market that this item fills.
http://www.anitgenius.com/how-to-replace-your-crappy-profile-picture-on-your-cr-48 Probably still going to tire after you get a smaller side screen add-on.
I recognize that people tend to try to justify their purchases after the fact. And, at the risk of sounding like I'm doing exactly that, after more than a year of using ChromeOS on the 1st gen Samsung Series 5 model, I remain happy with my purchase.(For comparison, my previous laptop was the last plastic MacBook, and before that a 1000 model of the Asus Eee, which I think was their 3d revision.)
The biggest criticism I have is that power supply plug will probably be the first thing to finally break. It has the same issues anything that isn't MagSafe does -- you can trip over it, bend the pins, and/or have your book go flying. What people seemed to overlook when pricing out the Chromebooks last year was that the 3G version included 2 years' worth of 100 MB per month of 3G access. Limited yes, but I've used it while traveling, have yet to exceed the limit before I'm back within WiFi range, and still have a year left to go. My usage pattern on my previous devices was already mostly browser based. No portable device that I've had has yet to prove sufficient for media or games, and I still have a desktop machine for that.
ChromeOS is a linux flavor. So if you must go with anything from Mint to Slack, it's no harder than it would be with any other laptop. Easier probably, because all of the hardware will necessarily have available linux drivers. If you've had to go through the pain in the ass that is/was ndiswrapper for wireless access in previous portable machines, you should understand why that's a nice perk. If you want you can install any other flavor of linux you can, and local storage is all of a USB cable away. You do miss out on the advantages of Trusted Platform Module, but might gain a bit in the way of speed. Speed -v- security is always going to be a compromise; encryption/decryption just takes time. ChromeOS has the fastest hard boot I've ever seen in a device-- you can cold-cycle the thing in twenty seconds, and it defaults to your last browser state. That's... really fucking nice, it turns out. Machine freeze on you after being left on for the past four weeks? Hold the button down for five seconds, and the longest part of your restart will be however long it takes you to enter your password.
What I've had was a low budget machine with excellent battery life --easily five times the length of a MacBook with an extra large battery-- a full size keyboard, a TCM, and native 3G connectivity to cover the areas where WiFi is out of range. If you're balking at the daring concept of minimal onboard storage (the horror!) I'd recommend you reconsider the respective value of features such as: TCM, two years' of basic, free 3G backup, guaranteed Linux support for all hardware, really good battery life, and not only a price range at which total loss or destruction of the device isn't particularly painful, but a forced use pattern that means you will probably not even lose any *data* in the case of theft or destruction.
I'm probably in a better position that you are to know what costs are and aren't.
You should also be aware that it's Samsung manufacturing the thing, and Google has only supplied software engineering resources, and a number of hardware reference designs.
Probably, because the ARM stuff I'm involved in has no keyboard or screen, however the point I'm trying to make is the hardware is cheaper than the retail price, and given enough sales it will be profitable.
A condescending quip to tell me to read a book containing things I was telling engineering students about twenty years ago may make you feel better about yourself but is otherwise pointless.
I think you just grossly underestimated how many Googlers it takes to run a fringe project.
And by the way, the ChromeOS project at Google isn't fringe. Yet.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
One place all computer browsers share is the internet.soon $2,000 computers for gaming are going to be obsolete. look into the tech news people.. gaikai and agawi are browser based hardcore and mmo recrewters.
Mark this on your calendars people: 12:12:12 :-)
Gaikai releases cloud gaming for all!
What are you using? Give me a chromebook or netbook anyday.