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Acer C7 Chromebooks Expand Chrome OS Market
Nerval's Lobster writes "Google is following up last month's Samsung Chromebooks with a new, lower-priced one developed by Acer. Retailing for $199, the 11.6-inch Acer C7 Chromebook features an Intel Celeron 847 processor, 2GB of DDR3 memory, a 320GB hard drive, three USB 2.0 ports and an HDMI port for various cords and auxiliary devices. It's designed for portability, weighing 3.05 pounds and measuring an inch thick. Boot time is reportedly less than 18 seconds. If the new Chromebook has a weakness, it's the advertised 3.5 hours of battery life. That's less than the MacBook Air (which features anywhere from 5-7 hours' battery life, depending on specs) and many of the Windows-backed Ultrabooks, some of which claim up to 11 hours of battery life depending on usage. It's also far less than the posted battery life for tablets such as Apple's iPad and Google's Nexus 7, which are widely viewed as the most prominent competition to laptops in the extra-portable category."
I have always thought of chromebooks being pretty much dependant on a web connection to do anything useful, but the C7 has a pretty serious amount of local storage. does that mean it could be used to do most things offline? document editing? playing audio and video? photo editing?
If I could get vanila linux on this, it's a fair price.
You can kick it into dev mode fairly easily, and it ships with fairly orthodox linux already on it('ChromeOS' has a deeply impoverished userland; but its kernel and such are much closer to normal desktop linux than Android is), so hardware compatibility will probably be OK-ish.
What I don't know, and haven't seen anybody mention one way or the other, is if you can(once you've entered dev mode) modify the UEFI to get rid of the scare-screen on boot.
If the new Chromebook has a weakness, it's the advertised 3.5 hours of battery life. That's less than the MacBook Air (which features anywhere from 5-7 hours' battery life, depending on specs) and many of the Windows-backed Ultrabooks, some of which claim up to 11 hours of battery life depending on usage.
You are comparing a $200 machine to one that starts at $1000. It's obviously not going to have the same spec. I'd rather have the $800 and slightly less battery life.
The processor does seem weak, but it is a $200 machine that's only going to be used for light tasks.
If these are the only real-world "weaknesses", it seems like great value, especially if you can put Linux on it.
Chromebooks come with coreboot (formerly known as LinuxBIOS), it is not a traditional BIOS, nor UEFI. UEFI, at least on the machines I have tried it, is slow to boot !!!!!!. but your question still is valid. I don't know if the developer mode switch allows firmware modifications. I hope so
I was already considering buying my wife the Samsung ChromeBook for Christmas; I'll need to see if I can play with one of these Acers to decide if the extra $50 is worth it.
She already has a laptop; this would be a second machine. Her MacBook is still very functional but is suffering some cosmetic damage and the battery life has declined a lot. I could buy her a new battery for less than the price of a ChromeBook... but there's also some value in having a "downstairs computer". The ChromeBook would probably live in the living room and kitchen, while the MacBook would stay in her bedroom.
I've also considered getting her a new computer... but I don't have a grand in the budget for a new Mac, and while I could probably deal with that I also have a moral objection to funding Apple's lawsuits -- and so does my wife, actually. I could buy her a regular laptop, but what OS would it run? I don't want to manage or mess with Windows, and she hasn't used Windows in many years so it'd be a learning curve for her... not so much the OS but the software she uses. I'd be happy to put Ubuntu on it, but the learning curve issue would be there, plus Netflix wouldn't work.
So, a ChromeBook is looking like a really excellent low-cost option. It would allow her to semi-retire the MacBook, keeping it around for the small amount of stuff she needs a "real" computer for, and not requiring her to learn new apps for photo editing, making greeting cards, videos, etc., but using the ChromeBook for e-mail, calendaring, docs, Facebook, TV, video chats, etc., which make up the bulk of her computing. Then I could spend the rest of her Christmas budget on other stuff.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The Acer suffers from a 320 GB HDD, 3.5 Hours Battery Life, and 18 second boot times.
The only current downside to the Samsung is that Netflix doesn't work yet.
Android is the current, and well-establish Google operating system for mobile phones and tablets, which is the #1 OS in that area. ChromeOS is the far less mature and established OS that represents Google's long-term OS goal, but whose current incarnations are more focussed on traditional keyboard-and-pointing-device type of environments than touch devices. It doesn't make sense to disrupt Android by forcing it to take on ChromeOS's role as well as its own, and it doesn't make sense to hold ChromeOS back by forcing it to take on Android's role. Chrome browser on Android is already the tool for bringing the parts of ChromeOS that work well with Android to Android (just as Chrome browser on Windows, MacOS, and Linux serves as the vehicle for those platforms.) Google's long-term goal -- that they've stated many times -- is to converge Android and ChromeOS. But they have pretty good reasons not to be in a hurry to do that.
Specs for the CPU itself seem oddly hard to come by. However, it looks like there are some barebones/appliance systems shipping based on it:
This reports the 847E has having Intel HD2000. Performance should be nice and dreadful; but it should at least work fairly smoothly.
This one isn't as informative on the spec sheet; but the VGA driver download, when I tested it, refers only to support for processors with some Intel HD graphics, not any of the atom models with powerVR crap.
I'll wait for somebody else to bite; but my money would be on a low-clocked; but reasonably well supported, Intel GPU.
And still save a LOT compared to the Macbook Air (like, $600). Heck, buy FIVE.
... I highly highly doubt there are many people out there just struggling with the "Oh, I WANT to buy an Acer Chromebook, but that battery means I guess I have to buy a Macbook Air instead" thought process.
that's my tongue-in-cheek way of pointing out that they have different target audiences
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh