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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".
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
> 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.