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."

Comments

Re:Yes

[Hadlock]

You must have a pile of money you're just aching to get rid of if you need to keep investing in things that are only "mostly worthless".
 
Google can go fuck themselves, free email is pretty awesome, but if you can't rely on the services that connect to it to be around in five years, there's no reason why I can't privatize my email on a portable cloud instance somewhere else. I don't even use Google Reader, but it's clear that the idea* that "you can trust your data with Google forever" is dead. Spending additional money for worse lock in than an Apple product? No thanks!
 
*ignoring the flaws in this line of thought