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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.
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.
I thought the same thing. "I have no use for this, in my life." Then someone pointed out where this fits: in the hands of every person that has ever asked me for tech support. This is perfect for the non geeks in my life. I'd love to never be asked to figure x a laptop again and this may just fit that mold.
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.
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?
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)?
As a Web terminal, my Cr-48 is fucking brilliant. Unbreakable operating system, nearly instant wake from sleep, good keyboard, touchpad, and screen. I'd take it over a tablet any day for web use, and it's been a daily driver of mine since December '10.
It's really only good as a web terminal, though. Doesn't run much on itself. Can do games that you can d/l from the Chrome store, but the old hardware's a bit slow - Atom N455 and 2GB of RAM. There's production hardware from Samsung that's got a Sandy Bridge-derived Celeron, which I expect is plenty fast.
Basically it's a brilliant second machine for technically-minded people, or a primary box for one's grandmother or luser father who keeps getting viruses from looking at internet porn, or for anyone who only needs Internet access. I almost never print from mine, but if you want to print you'll either need another computer serving out the printer, or a specially-enabled printer that can talk directly.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
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."
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.
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
"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.
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.
. Everyone else either uses their phone or uses webmail, IM instead or OMG Facebook.
Just sayin'
My phone's email system is a traditional IMAP client. So I'm store 'n' forwarding all the time.
Also, I use Thunderbird at home as I have two regularly used email addresses, and it makes it easier to check both simultaneously.
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.
"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.
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?
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.