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Here Come the Chromebooks, As Google and Intel Cozy-Up On Haswell
MojoKid writes "News from Intel (and Google) today includes an announcement that more Chromebooks are on their way to market packing Intel's Haswell processors. The new chips are designed to consume less power, thus preserving battery life for an all-day charge, while still offering better overall performance. Google notes that there are schools in over 20% of school districts across the country that now use Chromebooks, and with prices for some of the machines dipping as low as $199, deploying fleets of these machines in academia is an attractive option. What's interesting is the alignment between Intel and Google now, which should cause folks in Redmond to smart a bit, as yet another major competitor to the Windows operating system seems to clearly be coming into focus. Intel-Google partners including Acer, ASUS, HP, and Toshiba will be rolling out Chromebooks based on Haswell soon, and they'll collectively be sporting more variety of form factors."
11" display, SSD, running a cut-down Linux, intended primarily for use when connected to the Internet.
Hang on. Didn't we used to call these netbooks?
NSA's best friend.
And if what most people need is a bicycle, and a Chromebook covers their needs it's a competitor. If people buy these instead of something from Microsoft, it is definitely a competitor.
It may not be as general purpose as Windows, but it might show people they don't really need Windows. And that should at least worry Microsoft.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Troll -1
Yeah, but Henry Ford didn't ruin his company trying to build a car that was also a bicycle.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Chome OS is competition to Windows in the same way a bicycle is competition to an automobile.
When everything you need is with in a few blocks, a bicycle is a valid competitor to an automobile.
I would rarely use such a device (and never as a primary machine). My wife has successfully replaced her need for a desktop PC with an iPad and wireless keyboard. A light-weight laptop running Chrome OS would probably be fine for her. In the lightweight notebook category, Chrome OS is probably valid competition to Windows for most users.
What might be even more interesting is if Microsoft starts to deliberately issue a cheep starter version of Win8 to try to weasel users back to the one true Windows God. The worm has turned and it is running the Linux kernel this time around...LOL
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
which should cause folks in Redmond to smart a bit
For those of you who are new here, "Redmond" is a reference to the Microsoft (headquarters in Redmond, Washington). "Microsoft" is a company that used to be terribly important to most users of computers, but is becoming less so over time.
I wonder how long people will care enough about Microsoft to know what "Redmond" means. It's been years since I read an article that used "Armonk" to refer to IBM.
I suspect that this usage is just to avoid saying the same company name over and over. When the day comes that Microsoft isn't mentioned in the news that much, nobody will bother to call them anything but "Microsoft".
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Shareholders should be throwing chairs at you.
Many people buy Chromebooks who would otherwise buy a Windows license. So they're direct competitors.
No need to stick with the cut-down Linux, reinstall with a full Linux distro. I picked up an Acer C7 with this in mind. It seems to work quite nicely, its the first laptop I've installed Linux on with a complete set of functioning drivers. :-)
Admittedly the screen is mediocre and the touchpad crappy, but its a $200 box and such shortcoming should be expected. However for light to moderate Linux use it would seem a decent solution.
is that it's relatively lot easier to install proper Linux on the things. It's impossible with Surface devices however.
However, I feel a company the size and stature of Google should've pushed ARM based devices into the market - now Microsoft, Apple and now Google are all pushing Intel gear.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Is that a typo? Shouldn't it be NSAWell.
Ah, reminds me of the Mac/PC commercial mockery I saw somewhere.
I'm a Mac.
And I'm a PC.
Both: And it really doesn't matter which you choose because you spend all your time playing Flash games through your web browser.
will they run my windows apps?
They will run *cross platform* applications. You can install Linux and run Wine (I don't have wine installed you don't need it). The bottom line is though nobody is buying these devices to run legacy Windows Applications. The iOS and Android don't support windows applications and their market share is greater than Windows. Even the mighty Office was unable to protect Surface from a massive failure. There are devices that run legacy windows Applications...they are experiencing their 6th quarterly drop in sales.
I don't know; I think Mr. Harley and Mr. Davidson did pretty well by that concept.
Yeah, that people now expect whatever to work on their smart phones and tables was the left hook, that what works on their smart phones and tables can now also be had in a laptop format is the right hook. If you've already abstracted out your old PC application to work with Android and IOS, adding another platform should be easy. It's the kind of "cross-platform" that Windows/Mac/Linux never got real momentum behind. Not sure Chromebook is really it though, I'd wager more on an Android derivative.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I've already started seeing the increase in Chromebook usage in schools. I work for an educational supplements company as lead on a digital textbook platform. This time last year we had a lot of questions about iPads but nothing about chromebooks. Now, this week alone, I've talked to two teachers who said they were getting full sets of chromebooks for their students and wanted to make sure our software would work with them. Faster processors and cheaper prices is just going to keep increasing their hold on the market. Schools are going to take the cheaper route given two similar options, so I'm not surprised to see them going with these instead of iPads.
What I don't understand about this shocking new "alignment between Intel and Google" is that all of the Chrombooks up until the second-generation Samsung have used Intel chips. The first few used Atoms, and I think Acer is using something called a Celeron (though what goes by that brand these days, I'm not sure). Samsung's newest one uses its own Exynos chip, but it's unique in that. All of the rest of them use Intel chips. So what has changed, exactly?
Breakfast served all day!
Chome OS is competition to Windows in the same way a bicycle is competition to an automobile.
What you say is true, but maybe it doesn't make the point that you want it to make. They are both valid means of transportation, so they are in competition. Perhaps you mean to say is that because an automobile is so much faster and can carry more passengers and stuff than a bicycle, that the automobile will win any competition between the two methods of transportation. But different people have different needs at different times. For example, while I use my automobile to go to the supermarket, I take my bike to the train station because there is no place to park.
And I would never let my 11 year old daughter drive a car to school (even if it were legal), but a bike is perfectly fine.
I've got an Acer Chromebook running Crouton and XFCE4. Best little devbox I ever had, especially for $199 bucks. It used to be that you had to give up verified boot (and the automatic patching that implies), but no longer.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
... roll out that Linux version of Microsoft Office. I suspect its development has been secretly undertaken for quite some time now among those who have access to the source codes, whether Microsoft's executives know it or not.
I used my 7 inch EeePC for years with a full Linux install and these things are a helluvalot better.
My complaint with my Chromebook is lack of music playing ability when you don't have internet. Sure there is the MusicPlay thing, and Aschar Player, but they are both missing basic stuff like playing a play list on shuffle, or even playing a play list all the way through after I pick a song.
No, not everybody hacks C/java, they don't need a video editor, or sound editor or image editor. 90% of the people consume content, and the only content they create are simple letters and emails. Even the other 10% who create content using photo editors, video editors, audio editors, IDEs, apps, web pages etc, they don't need all this in all their computer. The market for full fledged content creation computers is 100 times smaller than the market for content consuming computers. Chromebooks are great playback devices for all kinds of media, audio, video, books, photos etc even when they are off line. When they are online, they can do everything that can be done through a browser.
The net effect of it is, our gravy train is coming to a halt. All these content consumers were subsidizing the general purpose computers we slashdotters typically love. Let us be prepared to pay high prices for a general purpose computer in the coming years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The Chromebooks look nice for certain situations, and I've been tempted to pick one up.
But why haven't there been any good ChromeBoxes?? I have unused monitors and keyboards sitting around, and there's plenty of cases which need a larger screen and a real keyboard.
If you can sell a full notebook with LCD, keyboard, and battery for $199, where is the $49 Chromebox?
Samsung's efforts have been a complete joke. Over $300? Really? Dell sells "real" computers for less. With Windows, even.
Supposedly the new Chromebox from ASUS is based on Intel's "Next Unit of Computing". That thing starts at about $200 with no RAM.
If Roku can sell an ARM box capable of decompressing Full HD streams for $49, why can't Google get one to run ChromeOS?
I've lost count how many times during my time in IT that I've seen "good enough" beat out "good". I still can't figure out why people run Windows Server for general purpose app servers instead of Linux or the Unix farms we used to have. Windows was "good enough" and all the financials made sense (I guess.. I didn't see those), so out went Unix and in came Windows. We should have all dumped IE long ago, but it was "good enough" and freely available on the desktops, so it stayed and wormed its way in as the standard. Databases... app dev languages.. I could go on and on where "good enough" beat out "good".
Chromebook is interesting because it's definitely aimed at the "good enough" thought process and seems to be gaining some traction, where I thought it would be rejected outright.
This begs the question, you can get a Haswell powered laptop for $200 with a full keyboard, so why not wipe out their OS and put Windows on it? Think about it, a device that's (potentially) as fast as a Surface Pro, but costs a load less. So what is MS charging for? The touch screen isn't Oh-Em-Gee necessary. Heck, why pay $400 for an Ultrabook even?
Regardless, it's x86, Haswell, and cheap. If you can put your own OS on it, then it beats all the Ipads/Galaxies out there because it has a keyboard and costs less.
Sufficed to say, it's about time generalized computing was cheap and easy for Joe Blow.
Paying more than $200 for one is nuts. They need to figure out how to make them cheaper.
These days, you can get a Windows 8 notebook for $350, sometimes less. With MUCH better specs than most ChromeBooks, and, obviously, much more software.
But Chromebooks are nice. ChromeOS is nice. Just too expensive.
I installed Crouton on a Samsung Arm Chromebook, and it has since become my main computer. Basically, it is the best of both worlds, in my book. Hassle free web experience (including Netflix), and I can flip any time to a "real" computing environment (there must be limitations with chroot. . . just have not found any for my use yet. mplayer over sshfs would have been a deal breaker, but it works perfectly fine . . .).
I am very content, but the price was so cheap there is nothing stopping me from trying out a Chromebook with Haswell or whatever comes down the pipe. Good times.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Is there an IDE that a ChromeBook can work with that would allow me to develope in PHP/Python? With Debug and Breakpoints? That would be useful.
and bicycles are healthy, and good with the environment. If more people use bicycles the world can become a better place. Yes, the analogy is a good one
How's the battery life on the c7? It's got an x86 processor in it, which is the main reason I haven't replaced my existing 13" ultraportable with something like that.
The original netbooks had tiny SSD drives - which were a new thing at the time, and of course, were only big enough to handle a stripped down distro of Linux. So you couldn't use those netbooks as a small standalone laptop. That is, until Microsoft decided that you had to be able to load XP on them. The tiny SSD drives got replaced with 160 GB hard drives, and the things became a little less of what they were intended to be (ultra-portable, quick to boot and indestructible). But yeah, they also became cheap standalone laptops at that point. Until they started eating into laptop sales and MS and the OEMs started making them less and less attractive.
The funny part is that some Chromebooks (from Asus, I think) also had those 160GB drives, and could be easily reworked into Linux laptops. I think they were essentially existing netbook designs with Chrome OS replacing the crippled Windows 7 starter edition that they had been strong-armed into loading onto their netbooks. Best of both worlds: a non-crippled full desktop OS (with netbook UI variants) - or Chrome. No need to pay (or settle) for Win7 starter (is there a Win8 starter edition for netbooks today?).
Either way, the netbook has been vindicated. It's not a 'compromise' - it's what people want. Small, cheap, ultra-portable and indestructible is where todays market sweetspot lies. And for many people, that's an iPad mini or a Nexus 7. But even if you need a desktop machine a Chromebook fits the bill for many people, and geeks can even load Linux on them. Sure, there's still a market for pricier ultrabooks and the like, but pricier is relative. The $1000+ computer market is an ever shrinking one.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
So if it's an x86 platform what's to stop people from putting Windows on these things?
will they run my windows apps?
There are Windows apps?!? Does anyone actually use them?
I'd give a chromebook a serious look if they could use my network printer. I recognize that printer drivers are the big issue, and that its possible to use a PC (via an internet loopback *ugh*). But I got the network printer so I *didn't* need to have a PC host it.
Linux on the Surface Pro is dead easy (disable secure boot - a simple and well-documented procedure - and then install as normal). What are you smoking (reading)? All Win8 devices with Secure Boot are required (by Microsoft, of all people) to allow the user to disable Secure Boot and/or add their own signing keys.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Chromebook = javascript && jquery || Golang
A good point that the computers will be more durable.
Google's statements to the contrary notwithstanding, it seems inevitable to me that the ChromeOS and Android product-lines will ultimately be merged into a single platform. Sort of like what Microsoft has attempted with Windows 8. Except Google will actually succeed at it.
Several folks have commented about these being a great option for the 'rents. Another option is for the kids. I've got three, all under 10 years of age. Information technology is pushed way big in school today, compared to when I was a kid. Outfitting my 3 boys with Chromebooks at $200 a pop is much more appetizing then buying them all $500 laptops, or buying one real computer for them to share. That and the Samsung Chromebook manages to be a MacBook that's been cost-reduced by 75%, without looking like it was cost-reduced by 75%.
How's the battery life on the c7? It's got an x86 processor in it, which is the main reason I haven't replaced my existing 13" ultraportable with something like that.
Don't know. I'm just tinkering around with it at home and I'm usually plugged in.
Hundreds of millions of people use them. None of those people care about *your* windblows apps. Windowblows whatever doesn't run on these. The apps that run on this are better. Computer does not equal 'windblows'. Embrace the future or get left behind. Some chose to become digital roadkill; you appear to be one of those. Its an opportunity to move your data to an open format where your data is more 'yours' and less the companies: moving your data would mean you are never 'forced' to a new version of some piece of software, your new software can read the format just like the old software, and the old software can read files from the new software (If you are using windows, the latter is something they *NEVER EVER* allow; they go out of their way to make the last incompatible (they promise!)). Or you can hang on desperately paying thousands more than those around you, like a man clinging to an old horse while those around him are using their 'horseless cariages' at speeds exceeding 50 miles per hour! Everyone knows its unsafe to ride a horse that fast, and never for hours at a time! The horseless carriage is just a passing fad. It will never last, just like this Chromebook stuff.
I know Microsoft really enjoys those licensing fees, and it must make them a mint, but at the moment what Microsoft needs more is to protect its dominance and brand. This would do it. Same specs, price, etc. Perhaps /. might opt for the Chromebook, but not the average consumer.
Perhaps this idea is too crazy.
Most serious developers I know have switched to Powerbooks running linux or windows on a virtual machines. If you're a professional developer, a chromebook whether the pixel or otherwise is useless. If you want to get your kid a computer -- buy them a Raspberry Pi and they'll get a gui and can learn to code while they're at it. Chromebooks are nothing more than another way for Google to get as much personal information from you as possible.
And I think some bigger ones like the one from HP has SO-DIMM slots.