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Google's Pricey Pixel Gets USB-C and a Lower Price
The Register reports that Google's high-end Chromebook Pixel has gotten a few spec bumps, and a lower price. It's still a touchscreen with a resolution of 2,560 × 1,700, but now that screen is backed by 8GB RAM (rather than 4) as a base configuration, and the system is equipped with a Broadwell Core i5 chip, rather than the Ivy Bridge in the first rev. The price has dropped, too; it may still be the most expensive Chromebook, but now it's "only" $999 on the low end, which is $300 less than the first Pixels cost. ($1300, though, gets an i7, 64 gigs of SSD instead of 32, and 8GB of RAM. Perhaps most interesting is that it adds USB type C, and (topping Apple's latest entry) it's got two of them.
Right now on my work PC, Excel.exe, which I'm using to reformat the giant big-ass Excel sheets I keep being given by another department into a form I can easily load into our DB, is taking up 14M. Firefox is coming in at 567M (and, to be honest, that's the smallest I've seen it in a while, but OTOH I did restart it recently and it only has a few tabs open.)
So... actually... it makes sense that a device that requires you use the Google office apps rather than native apps, would require you use considerably more memory and power.
Yes, it's ridiculous, but think of it like this: how optimal do you think a Google spreadsheet, implemented over JavaScript, the DOM, and XML, in turn implemented over various abstraction layers that eventually get down to C++ and some kinda linkage to the native widgets of the underlying OS, is, compared to a Microsoft/GNOME Spreadsheet implemented directly in C++, with a little abstraction but not a lot between that C++ and the underlying OS?
TL;DR: A device that forces you to run desktop apps inside a web browser will always need more power than a device that allows optimized apps to run.
Which is probably why we shouldn't be heading in this direction.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.