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Why You Should Worry About the Future of Chromebooks
dcblogs writes "PC manufacturers may try to corral Chromebook, much like Netbooks, by setting frustratingly low hardware expectations. The systems being released from HP, Acer, Lenovo and Samsung are being built around retro Celeron processors and mostly 2 GB of RAM. By doing so, they are targeting schools and semi-impulse buyers and may be discouraging corporate buyers from considering the system. Google's Pixel is the counter-force, but at a price of $1,299 for the Wi-Fi system, reviewers, while gushing about hardware, believe it's too much, too soon. The Chromebook is a threat to everything, especially PC makers, as its apps improve. Compare Tweetdeck's HTML5 version with its native app. Can you tell the difference? It might be a year or two before Adobe delivers Web-only versions of its products, but if it doesn't it will be surrendering larger portions of its mindshare to users of Pixlr, Pixel Mixer, PicMonkey and many other interesting and increasingly capable tools."
And then when it fails to bring money it gets discontinued. And you have a very expensive paperweight... Google Reader was an eye opener. Depending on a third party for core functionality is something I'll be avoiding from now one, since you never know...
Lighten up people. The world isn't going to fall into some permanent software as a service hellscape.
Sorry but web apps could be 100% perfect. That's fine but only if you have a web connection. Yes, some apps at least have an offline mode but you get minimal storage even on Google high-end chromebook which is even more off-putting because you're paying macbook prices for something inferior to a macbook (no a touch screen doesn't add anything of real value). There is still a lot of real work, like development which seem impossible to do on a chromebook. Some businesses do use them but from what I see they're throw-away devices used for people only really need to write "word docs" on google docs and email. I don't think anyone would trust it for much else and I don't blame them. It's like a handicapped version of linux.
Just because something is new doesn't magically make it better. HTML5 isn't a silver bullet that magically makes everything better; in fact Adobe makes desktop applications because that's what makes sense to do, *not* because it's the latest fad.
At any rate, have fun uploading 20 gig videos to the cloud before editing them. I'll stick with Final Cut on my Mac, thanks.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Broad controversial claims ... popcorn munching time.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
If we have learned anything from the contemporary atomosphere it is that privacy is not just important it is the most important battle in our time. Chromebook is a threat to everything that is good about privacy and about personal computing. Imagine every little aspect of your computing experience being reported to Google all of the time. That's the future Google wants, and that's a totalitarian nightmare even worse than what we have currently.
Google will drop support for Chromebooks when the next shiny thing comes along and people figure out this is a modern day Wyse terminal.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Compare Tweetdeck's HTML5 version with its native app. Can you tell the difference?
No, because I'm still using Tweetdeck 0.38.1. I tried the newer version, but every so often it just decides it doesn't want to pull updates anymore.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
We are about to begin the process of travelling back in time. Back to a time when PCs were for experts: people who coded, people who needed specialist tools and people who wanted to tinker.
The good news in this transition is that we may get back to buying a PC that is geared to what we want rather than being full of junk that tech-illiterates need (specifically in the OS). If MS don't want to provide that experience (and evidence suggests that they don't) then we will just all wipe the machines and put linux on them.
The bad news is that we will also travel back in time with the price of a PC. Inflation has ran at 3-5% for the last 25 years (give or take a couple of years), yet the cost of a baseline PC has more than halved in that time. That scale only comes with the addition of the tech-illiterate (& Chinese assembly) - once they buy pixibooks and tablets we will be left to pick up the full price for our dedicated high power PCs. The only possible depression on prices is corporate buying, but it can't be too long before they create a stable lightweight environment to get the bulk of corporate work done instead of buying a workstation for every desk.
The Chromebook is a threat to everything, especially PC makers, as its apps improve. Compare Tweetdeck's HTML5 version with its native app.
It's a thin client. Chrome OS is not likely to put a dent in my plans to continue buying PCs until Google can guarantee complete network coverage everywhere and HTML5 apps are written that can replace complex native apps like Photoshop and the likes. There is a world of difference between Tweetdeck and really complex native apps. Then there is the issue of all my data residing on 3rd party data-center which might get hacked, data mined by the service provider without my permission, destroyed in an unseasonal flood disaster or just discontinued because the service failed to meet profitability goals. Nobody is going to discontinue the SSD in my laptop due to its failure to meet some corporate weasels profitability expectation any time soon and the same goes for my backup disks.
Every few years there seems to be a push to get people to accept these ass-backwards computers. Apparently the software companies love the concept of users being held captive to them and requiring their permission just to run the simplest application. "Renting" software on a per usage basis is like their wettest dream.
I remember back in the day, Oracle was pushing these "Net Computers" or NCs as being the future. Nobody needs to run software from their own hard drive, you can just get everything from the Net! Except for the fact people's hard drives were 4 orders of magnitude faster than their internet connection (and will continue to be so for any foreseeable future). Nobody ended up buying this shit and it went into the dustbin of history.
But looks like they're trying it again, except now it's been renamed "cloud computing".
Serious question. Can you store files and run apps locally? I don't know. If the answer is "no", then it's obviously worthless garbage.
PC manufacturers may try to corral Chromebook, much like Netbooks, by setting frustratingly low hardware expectations.
...because unless Chromebooks are significantly cheaper than a regular computer running Windows/OX X or Linux, where's the point? When/if almost everything has moved to the cloud, Chromebook-type machines will make a lot of sense. In the meantime, a regular computer gives you the best of both worlds - you can run native applications and fire up a browser to use web apps.
Chromebooks should be most useful in corporate environments where the cost of maintaining hundreds of individual OS installations is a big issue - but such organisations are going to be conservative about moving to cloud-based applications, and typically rely on lots of legacy software...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The same broken concept of crippled terminal type computers seems to have been repeated so many times over the past 30 years (time I have been in IT). The chromebook is just yet another attempt at a concept that consumers have shown repeatedly they don't want. I really expect (and hope) chromebooks also end up on the trash heap of bad ideas just like all the previous versions, the concept seems more aimed at what software and advertising companies want not what users need or want.
Pretty much the same thing that happens to your cool HBO GO and Netflix apps when you get on an airplane.
Microsoft placed restrictions on hardware for a Win 7 Starter license, which I think paved the landscape for netbooks more than anything else.
...to the Chromebook concept, if the model was closer to something like Dropbox: the master copy of a document is on the server, but you always have a local working copy, and you can keep working on it while you're offline; it gets synced the moment you go online. Using HTML5 as the application language is fine; you just need to be able to keep enough of the applications cached locally to do all the offline work.
This is a problem domain whose various aspects that has been explored for decades by X terminals, VNC, Remote Desktop, etc. Remote file syncing has also been explored for a long time, and we now have good working solutions in application-specific arena like IMAP and git, as well as general solutions like Dropbox. I still can't believe Google ignored all of these lessons, and instead decided to re-animate the late-90s "network computer" zombie.
Android does everything Chrome does, plus lots more. At least for the consumer: I understand the need for .Corp , .Gov and .Edu to have dumb clients, but Consumers can benefit more from a more independent OS.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The next step will be HTML6 that can be downloaded and can run offline like a normal application. Then someone will start build a web browser in HTML6, and try to sell it as something "new" and in the "cloud". That will be a HTML6 extension HTML7.
No really, WTF? Finally we reached the technology that any mobile phone can be faster then anything 20 years ego. But noooo, now we need to put everything on the web. So it will run 100x slower, tied to a browser, and if the Internet connection goes down, so go your data and your app.
Of course Apple, MS and Google are very happy of this development. So are Hollywood studios and music publishers. So they can exercise tight control over the apps and the content and Google can get all your stuff what you do on the computer/device and data mining it for ads.
I was /really/ impressed with WebGL. http://webglsamples.googlecode.com/hg/aquarium/aquarium.html /really/ impressed. You know I can run the same demo with 400fps and 1% CPU usage? Yes it runs in the web browser, so what? Just let me download the app and I can run it too. With Java and JOGL you had the option 10 years ego. But whatever.
It runs with about 20 fps and uses up 15% of my CPU. I'm
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Siri is genius. Saves battery life for some bandwidth usage which is less of an issue over time than battery life. Audio recognition will eat up as much CPU cycles as you can throw at it and the software is still evolving. Placing such a feature on server farms and mainframes ensure the best experience and trouble free seamless upgrades. Eventually, it'll work well enough and fast enough to run locally.
The intelligent features that leverage your personal information will provide an excuse to hand that info to a 3rd party... the incentive to port it locally disappears when all that extra information that makes it "smart" is no longer sent. While it is possible Apple would be willing to give that information up and some battery life; someday when technology permits.
GOOGLE WILL NEVER do it. They are all about gathering as much about you as possible and keeping it forever even if they don't have any use for the information at the time.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Yes. That's rather the point of the variety of offline-related APIs that have been pushed as web standards by -- largely though not solely -- Google and which are supported by ChromeOS (and, for that matter, Chrome and a number of browsers on other OS's, too.)
Chrome is a technology looking for a problem to solve, at least for me and for most people. Yes, Google (and maybe some other companies) would be happy if they were constantly controlling the apps you were using, but I so no advantage in that approach to me. (And I see serious disadvantages.) I have a MacBook Air that I'm very, very happy with. It's simple to use and manage. It's small and light. Why would I possibly be better-served by comparable hardware running a browser-based OS? It makes no sense from my point of view. I don't want it and I'm not buying it. If it happens to suit your needs, great. But for most people, native apps running completely without an online connection when necessary are the way to go.
Retro? There is nothing retro about the current breed of Celeron processors (like the 887). To put that in perspective: those are full dual core CPU's that have about the performance of Core 2 Duo CPU's from around 4 years ago. Heck, they're Sandy and Ivy bridge based! Low power too! I'd wager to say they're based on the Core i3 cores. They truly are nothing to spit at.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
That's pretty much exactly the model for apps using the offline APIs that are central to the idea of ChromeOS's viability.
They didn't.
The Chromebook detractors don't have one.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Microsoft should have posted the Pixel video as an April Fools joke.
Never thought id hear a statement like that, and it doesn't really apply as they are new ones, not NOS from some basement storage room...
I prefer the ARM based one instead.. but somehow i doubt it will last long.
Our laptop standard is an 8GB quad processor barely sufficient to run Linux and Windows emulation.
I'll be honest, I never understood why Google keeps pushing ChromeOS. The 2 devices where "It needs to be connected to a network in order to be useful at all" (Phone and TV) they decided to go with Android so really why bother ? It's like someone high up in Google is stuck in the 1970's/ 80's mainframe mentality where client hardware is weak and expensive and connectivity to the server is cheap, when in fact we live in the opposite world of that.
One issue with the Chromebooks is that if you upgrade the memory or hard drive to a ssd, you void the warranty. I asked a Chrome tech to confirm this with a supervisor. You are not going to get much geek interest in a product if they can't upgrade a hard drive. So... It is going to languish with the low end users and not do much. My 2 cents
Most people are not like a typical slashdot reader. They have been plunking down cash for tower cases and expansion bays and 99% of the tower cases finish their life without the users ever upgrading/expanding anything. Most people use a puny 4 inch screen to get to the net via mobile phone networks. The number of poor people, minorities, migrants whose sole internet access comes from the smartphone dwarfs slashdot audience. They access the net, and that all they do. They don't edit photos, or videos, they don't rip mp3 from CDs, they don't write any document more complex than a letter, they would not know a presentation software if it came and bit them in their tail. For them chromebook, with a tethered smartphone is all they need.
But it will adequately serve as the second or the third internet device for anyone and will be a great boon as the primary internet device for lots of people. I bought one a month ago. I know it can edit google drive documents and presentatins off line. It can view spreadsheets off line. It can play back all kinds of media stored in the local drive back video and audio. Already read it later off line apps are there. Soon they will mature to a point where I can set up a cron job to download content overnight and watch it in the bus during commute completely off line. good enough.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Chromebooks are awesome for non tech folks. Buy one for your parents and you'll never get another tech support call. I'd call the $249 Chromebook a deal for what you get. Yes they do have slots for more storage including USB. Stop trying to cram Linux on something just because you can. Great you installed Linux, now what? Meanwhile people are using them for their intended purpose. If you want a real laptop then buy one. I'll never understand the Chromebook hate on here.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
How low are Slashdot's standards, and yet each day this place gets worse.
QUOTE: "retro Celeron processors"- we have a prize for cretin of the century. Intel uses various names to describe its CPUs, and none of them are strongly indicative of performance. They are, instead, used for branding, and also to allow very good parts to be sold much cheaper than usual, in order to win space in difficult markets. The 'celeron' in the Chromebook usually refers to a state-of-the-art ULV dual-core Intel processor, clocked at an unusually low speed.
Intel's word for UTTER CRAP is 'Atom'. No good processors have ever been branded 'Atom' by Intel. 'Pentium' is a more difficult branding, sometimes meaning a part little better than an 'Atom' and sometimes a part not a whole lot worse than the best cores.
'Celeron' in a Chromebook means Intel's best (but at a low clock-speed).
Chromebooks are nothing like netbooks (where does Slashdot dig up these morons). Netbooks were despised as slow, with dreadful graphics (they couldn't even play hidef video). Chromebooks are actually quite nippy for their usage class, and are rapidly improving thanks to a price and feature war between Intel and ARM.
The next round of Chromebooks, with quad A15 cores from Samsung's exynos, and dual/quad core jaguar from AMD will be very good mobile devices indeed.
> It might be a year or two before Adobe delivers
> Web-only versions of its products
LOLOL. Fucking A. The day Adobe stops shipping native apps will be the day when the bandwidth between adobe.com and my house is as high as the bandwidth between my CPU and my RAM, and as reliable. Which is to say, FUCKING NEVER.
What MORON doesn't see much difference between between editing 140 MB images and reading 140-character posts? That's literally a million-to-one difference right there. (1,048,576 to 1, actually.)
In other news, the head of a company with a BILLION users said moving to HTML5 was his biggest mistake.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Because Chromebooks are exactly zero threat to any of the three established operating systems. It's all hype, smoke and mirrors. If people want a lightweight computer, the iPad and its Android counterparts are right there, priced well and offering all manner of ergonomic amenities superior to any lap-anything... even if you need to type seriously, a cheap bluetooth keyboard and you're going. If, on the other hand, someone actually needs a laptop, it'll be to run software X; and a Chromebook... won't. Best you can say for them is they can be crowbarred to run linux; but we already know how linux laptops fare in the marketspace. Not well. Chromebooks are simply a bad idea, DOA, FUBAR and catastrophically late to the party.
What you want to be paying attention to at this point in time is Google Glass. Now that is likely to change your life. You won't like it, either.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For the first time in human history, Microsoft may break their "every other product sucks" cycle by releasing two crappy OSes in a row. So they're just in time for massive non-MS tablet and phone adoption where everyone and their grandma knows how to operate an android interface. Apple already doubled their market share during Vista time. Ubuntu is (debatably) getting more useable by the average Joe. Now Chromebooks come in a non-toy, actual business-use device that's cheap. Thin terminals are an incredible, unbelievably, immensely stupid solution but a monitor and terminal is like $200 so tada, call centers and places run by cheapos use them. So Chromebooks at $250, most people know how to operate one, and it runs useful apps? The tipping point is when 3rd party mega-suites start releasing alternate OS versions of their client software. Right now it's basically VPN/RDP or native Windows for CRMs and stuff. But Driven and Fishbowl and Quickbooks all have Android apps so, bye bye MS.
In reality, they have the money. They'll fire every other person in charge of UI design and planning and make something their customers actually want by Windows 10. I just hope, FOR ONCE, they learn their lesson permanently! Considering the every other cycle is since Windows 3.1, that's doubtful.
Remember netbooks? They got to be rather good under-$300 laptop computers before the industry killed them off for not being expensive enough and not requiring any expensive or intrusive "cloud service".
What are you talking about? I have a Samsung XE500C21, which is fast enough for surfing the web and running an ssh client (which is also all it does), has 8.5 hours of battery life, and is easy to carry.
It is a threat to everything except doing things by visiting websites or logging in to *nix machines to do real work, which happens to be what I and a lot of other people have been doing for years. It's also fairly close to what smartphones and tablets do.
I also see no signs of manufacturers making things worse; indeed, I see a number of manufacturers creating a greater diversity of models, similar, cheaper, and more capable. Is this a dying platform?
What killed netbooks is that manufacturers stopped making cheap ones, and instead just branded things netbooks that were in the same price range as low-end laptops. Effectively, they stopped catering to the niche that netbooks occupied - cheap portable computers. With Chromebooks, I see none of that happening yet. In fact, you might say that Chromebooks are a netbook revival.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
No one is "constantly controlling the apps you" are using on a Chromebook, any more than on a traditional desktop.
1) In North America the internet robber-barons have imposed monthly usage caps (i.e. max amount of gigbytes of internet usage). Uploading+downloading stuff to run the "Cloud Computer" model will go through your monthly usage quota in no time flat.
2) With all your data on a PC (and backups on USB drives), identity theft won't steal or wipe your data. However, if your data is in the cloud, identity theft can destroy your data http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/08/07/0250248/how-apple-and-amazon-security-flaws-led-to-mat-honans-identity-theft The moral of the story is to back up your data locally. Offsite backup doesn't hurt either.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I'm currently typing this on a Chromebook which I bought for travel purposes. I couldn't be happier. It worked perfectly and was cheap enough that I just bought the thing and hoping it "just works". I've already recommended it to two people, one of which has bought the chromebook.
The reality is that a ChomeOS is still a bit rough around the edges to be able to do everything and anything. There's a skype client, but no video for instance. Printing is a big pain in the ass to set up, and requires you to connect the printer to a "cloud service". Good luck with that.
But those are relatively minor inconveniences. The portability of these little systems is perfect for travel, and now that I'm back it's also perfect for a supplementary laptop I can just pull out upstairs for some casual web browsing. Any new product is a bit of a risk, especially with an operating system. ChromeOS is picking the value market for the novice user or supplementary laptop user. It's perfect for this market as the thing is simple and geared toward doing one thing well. The web.
Operating systems of the past had to be geared towards all kinds of supplementary apps because that's what you did with a computer. But these days there's a big segment of the population that just wants a computer to use the internet. They don't want to print emails, they don't want to develop software, they don't want to play a first person shooter. They just want to use Facebook and check email. Chromebooks outperform windows by a wide margin on this task. They just work, and there's no bullshit to deal with.
The Chromebook is a threat to everything
I'm a web developer. How is a world where every computer is basically a machine running a browser bad for me?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Chromebooks are specifically designed for that demografic/generation of users that confuse(d) Google and the Web (the internet userbase that roughly joined around 2005) and those that came after that.
Google is spot on with this strategy and I know at least a handfull of users for which Chrome OS would be one of the better choices for an OS.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
1) Linux runs very well on Chromebooks.
2) The Samsung Chromebook was Amazon's biggest selling laptop. Which is impressive considering there where none available for about two months.
Use a thumbdrive, SDHC card, or store everything in the cloud.
The world is changing.
You remind of on the people who used to say that x86 architecture could never be used for servers.
If HTML5/JavaScript effectively replaces X11 as the display server on Linux, this could be an OK approach and one that doesn't need to mean the end of the desktop PC either.
I was all excited that the 1st generation Chromebook was an ARM processor with good battery life. I was a little disappointed with some of the other specs (screen mainly) Then they switched to Intel chips :-(
Where is my full HD resolution ARM based notebook? I'm ready to get off the x86 train.
I'm older than dirt and I am fully aware of what the Chromebooks can and cannot do. For me it was the perfect fit for a kitchen laptop for online radio, spotify, youtube and recipe browsing. $199 and easy enough for my kids to use.
While I do like my Chromebook, I must inform you that you are mistaken. All of my ChromeOS apps are hosted, which means that they are very much controlled and maintained by the developer. All of my traditional OS apps (even in Android) are held on my device and I decide when I want to update them to what the developer has decided is "good". For example, I haven't updated my iTunes app on any of my devices for a couple of years now because I have heard bad things about the newer versions. "Not updating" is impossible in the Chrome OS model. I have a SimCity install that I can play with anytime I want whereas the new SimCity model is completely dependent on what the host decides is appropriate. It is very much a different model and the user loses a tremendous amount of control. But I would not always consider that a bad thing...
Neither of those are inherent features of the OS. You can build a ChromeOS app that let people continue using old versions even when newer ones are available, and you can build apps for traditional OS's that, even though they are installed natively, phone home and refuse to run anything but the latest version.
Also -- and this may have been a misreading -- GP was a response to reading GGP as expressing the view that Google would control all of your apps on the Chromebook, not that each app vendor would control their own apps. Each app vendor controlling their own app (including having the option of deciding not to exercise invasive control) may be the case with ChromeOS, but then again, it is exactly the case with traditional desktop OS's, as well.
Yeah, and that new SimCity model is for a game on a traditional desktop OS and has nothing to do with ChromeOS.
(I knew I shouldn't have mentioned SimCity, because it is obviously not a ChromeOS app, but it does fall into the category of apps that are heavily controlled by the hosting developers. Take or leave the "point" as you will. I won't touch it again.)
Agree very much that it is not Google that controls your apps, but whomever hosts them. The GGP (GGGP now?) parenthetically alluded to it not being just Google, but I agree with you that they didn't give enough credence to the fact that the vast *vast* majority of apps are well outside of Google's control.
Fair enough that both traditional and "hosted app" OS's can maintain the "feature" of the author controlling the current version of the app. But the model promoted by the ChromeOS does inherently *promote* the control of the app being in the author's hands. If the author chooses to maintain multiple versions of their apps on their servers, that is still the author controlling the app. Yes, I realize that *not* requiring an installed app to check with the mother ship is also in the author's hands, but it is less work for the author to *not* check in via installed app and *more* work for the author to maintain prior release in a hosted app. In this sense, it is inherent in the hosted model, even though it is not a requirement of the OS.
I hope we get to that winning stage soon! ;>)