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Leaked Document Sheds Light On Microsoft's Chromebook Rival (windowscentral.com)
Microsoft has announced plans to host an event next month where it is expected to unveil Windows 10 Cloud operating system. Microsoft will be positioning the new OS as a competitor to Chrome OS, according to several reports. Windows Central has obtained an internal document which sheds light on the kind of devices that will be running Windows 10 Cloud. The hardware requirement that Microsoft has set for third-party OEMs is as follows: 1. Quad-core (Celeron or better) processor.
2. 4GB of RAM.
3. 32GB of storage (64GB for 64-bit). 4. A battery larger than 40 WHr.
5. Fast eMMC or solid state drive (SSD) for storage technology.
6. Pen and touch (optional). The report adds that Microsoft wants these laptops to offer over 10-hour of battery life, and the "cold boot" should not take longer than 20 seconds.
2. 4GB of RAM.
3. 32GB of storage (64GB for 64-bit). 4. A battery larger than 40 WHr.
5. Fast eMMC or solid state drive (SSD) for storage technology.
6. Pen and touch (optional). The report adds that Microsoft wants these laptops to offer over 10-hour of battery life, and the "cold boot" should not take longer than 20 seconds.
As long as you can turn off Secure Boot so it's a general-purpose computer, this might be a good thing.
>> Leaked Document Sheds Light On Microsoft's Chromebook Rival
The Russians did what now?
If Microsoft does not comment on rumours, why should we? I see this whole article as an advert for consumer gear. Not really my cup of tea.
Q: what do you call a stalker who waits six years before taking a step to follow target
A: not much of a threat
I'm betting they name the device the Microsoft Zunebook!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
As long you can completely turn off the "cloud' thing, yes.
Under 20 second cold boot...My cheap Hisence chromebook will cold boot in about 6 seconds and resume in 2 seconds. The entire out of the box set-up process takes 10 seconds (google log-on & password + wifi selection) and your ready to go. Windows laptops seem to ask 20 questions at setup and need to reboot and install updates several times before first use. Also, Chromebooks don't show ads on the lockscreen or app menu, have tons of presinstalled apps you don't want and do not have a bunch of 60 day trialware programs.
It depends on the price, if it is ~$249 it will be nice especially if we can install a linux distro on it!
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
When I took Introduction to Computers in the early 1990's, the instructor informed us that 4GB with a 32-bit CPU was all the memory we would ever need. Back then 8- and 16-bit CPUs was quite common and RAM was in single-digit megabytes. His statement held true in my personal life until I upgraded my nine-year-old motherboard/processor/memory last year. For years I had 4GB RAM. Now I have 8GB RAM on my gaming rig and laptop, and 12GB on my file server. I think 4GB is the new 2GB.
Keep in mind Microsoft would of NEVER done this had Google not had success with the Chromebook model.
Can I reformat the Hard Drive and install Linux? One of the reasons that I have steered away from Chromebooks, is the whole "Developer mode Wiping out the OS" thing. I will not accept a situation where I cannot install whatever I want, or have to wait 30 seconds to boot, or if I don't press Space Bar then Enter it will wipe my OS. I would only consider this if I knew I could:
1. Disable UEFI Secure Boot, and load a Linux of my choice.
2. Nothing would trigger it to delete my Linux install and start reinstalling Windows from Elsewhere.
This is what I do with my Toshiba laptops. Windows never boots. I put the disc in, boot to the CMOS, boot from the disk, wipe hard drive, fresh install.
If you needed a laptop to access a couple of Windows applications, they should be able to do it. I'd go with one of those over a Chromebook since they should be a able to do a little more.
The specs indicate a higher-priced machine, but I don't know how well it will sell with a hobbled OS.
Maybe it's aimed at institutional/business users.
Actually, the NetBook sort of predated the Chromebook and laid the foundation for ChromeOS success...
Unfortunately, I don't doubt that Microsoft will successfully hobble this offering even more seriously than Google has the Chromebook... No doubt something silly like not including a USB port at all or only being able to have 3 windows open at a time or not being able to run Win32 applications.
This is not the first time Microsoft has tried to get something going at the lowest end of the market.
The netbook's demise ultimately came about when no one could find a use case for them and regular windows laptop prices plummetted to be within $1-200 while offering better hardware features and Chromebooks undercut them in terms of cost since they paid no Windows tax. Apple will claim the iPad had something to do with it too, and that may hold some water, but ultimately Netbooks were impeded from wider adoption by not having the muscle to run Windows 7, Microsoft discontinuing licensing for XP, and otherwise running linux variations that weren't quite ready for prime-time for consumers.
Your list of features is directly at odds with the goal of making a laptop that is immune to malware and brainless to administer. The whole system needs to be protected against any kind of modification by the end-user. So no, this will not meet your needs. And that's OK, because not every product needs to be for Slashdot readers to use directly. I imagine there are a lot of us whose lives have been made way easier by the broad adoption of Chromebooks, even if we don't use them ourselves.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I still have a measly 2GB in this here box and the only reason it isn't enough is because "web browsers". Most of what I do besides wasting time on the world-wide web is... typing text. And for that even my usual nvi (not the monstrous vim) is already oversized. I could go back to the old q.exe (50kB) and that'd be more editing power than I really need already.
Alright, so I run assemblers, compilers, typesetters, scripts, macro expanders, indexers, and html generators on various kinds of text I produce. So those are a little more resource hungry, some of them anyway. Mostly unnecessarily so; compare the old turbo pascal with the old turbo C -- different languages but in the end both give me a runnable program, yet for massively different resource usage generating the runnable code from the program text. Modern C and C++ compilers haven't grown more efficient with their resource use. Neither have modern text setting programs and all the other things. Most notably browsers.
I noticed before that I did roughly the same things in 2000, and I had 32MB of memory and a single 166MHz core then. I have 2330MHz over four cores now though it makes no appreciable difference before the upgrade from a two core CPU, and those 2GB of nicely fast gamer memory. The bottleneck remains the same thing: The browser. The memory requirements have gone up, the CPU requirements have gone up, the disk requirements have gone up, but I'm not getting more use out of the newer fancier hardware. Or the newer fancier software; all "upgrading" does is up the requirements and maybe make some asshole websites bitch less about outdated browsers, but they don't give me extra functionality or work better, or otherwise improve. They really only get worse, more annoying, fatter, more resource-hungry, more behind-my-back tattling and ratting and doing whatever else. In fact, I used to have 1600x1200 pixels in front of me, only 1280x1024 now.
So to me the problem is flat out simple that we waste our computing resources with gay abandon.
And this brings me to the ultimate irony: Four cores and four GB of RAM and 32GB of storage minimum... just to run your programs elsewhere, "in the cloud"? That's a thin client we're talking about! All it needs to do is ship user input over the network and receive a picture to show in response. What gives?
In the previous /. posting, I noted my disbelief when I said that Microsoft would have to seriously change it's operating model and asked about them trying to compete against Google, which doesn't monetize the platform.
Well, if there's a "pro" version of the Windows 10 Cloud OS, then I don't think Microsoft understands what they have to do to be successful in this space.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
In this space, you're not going to see any Kaby Lakes or massive amounts of memory or even impressive video/audio so listing the hardware doesn't mean much.
What I'm most interested in is what will be the application infrastructure is (ie a useable version Office) as well as document distribution for classes (Google Classroom has developed into a pretty slick tool). Another question would be what Microsoft will do for a browser on the device as Edge doesn't work all that great and pages don't display the same as they do on Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.
So, what will make Microsoft's offering special/compelling against ChromeOS?
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Chromebooks are successful because if one breaks you simply give the kid another. When they log in it'll quickly be their machine again. Windows is going to be to slow to repair/replace. Even the best they can do is come within 25% of Chrome's boot time. Nothing Windows is "fast". I don't expect any OEM's to use a high end quad core CPU, just Celeron J1900 and AMD 5350 types. I see no advantage to end users here. Microsoft is again grasping at straws.
Just not in a positive way - just for all the reasons you've mentioned and more.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I would assume it is meant to be used with Office 365
love is just extroverted narcissism
RT, only shittier, and partially banked by selling your data.
1. Quad-core (Celeron or better) processor.
Of which generation? I guess it doesn't matter, because Celeron is ass regardless.
2. 4GB of RAM.
I was on 16 GB minimum 6 years ago! I understand that plebs don't need that much, but come the fuck on. If this is a "cloud" OS then it's going to involve shitty web apps gobbling up tons of RAM in a bloated browser. How could you not specify 8 GB as a minimum? It's hardly any more expensive in terms of BoM.
3. 32GB of storage (64GB for 64-bit).
Two fails here. First, why is there a 32-bit variant? If this is a locked-down "cloud" terminal, seize the opportunity to move forward. Who the fuck makes 32-bit-only hardware that will be connected to a "cloud" device such as this? Secondly, most of the 32 gigs will be eaten by Windows itself. Even on 64 gigs, Windows will slowly eat away more and more of it.
I guess the 6-month cadence of updates is their plan to fix that, as each big update on Windows 10 (and whatever the fuck they end up calling this) is a complete reinstall. They nuke your old windows directory X days later, thus curbing the cancerous growth that is WinSxS (or whatever it's called in 10) and other such shit.
64 gigs would be serviceable for people who truly live "in the cloud", but I expect people who expect to have local copies of photos, music, or shitty apps/games from the store will quickly hit the wall on the 64 GB models. I presume many of these things would have a microSDXC slot for increased capacity, of course that's' not ideal.
4. A battery larger than 40 WHr.
This is shit, but it lines up with a lot of the other shit on the market, so I can't say it's unexpected.
5. Fast eMMC or solid state drive (SSD) for storage technology.
Define fast. There are plenty of crappy SSDs. Why not just require a certain (random) read/write speed? My guess is that many of these things will have soldered-on storage chips, so fuck you if you want to upgrade or when the performance starts to degrade over time.
6. Pen and touch (optional).
You mean as an added cost. I hate the 2-in-1 concept. Just be a laptop or toy, don't try to be both. A stylus can be useful, but I doubt any of the devices sold under this shit will use a good one / good digitizer.
The report adds that Microsoft wants these laptops to offer over 10-hour of battery life, and the "cold boot" should not take longer than 20 seconds.
Well, then maybe the 40 WHr requirement should be stepped up. And what is a "cold boot" for this "cloud" OS? Is it the fake cold boot / hybrid shutdown shit? Is it the fake cold boot where UEFI skips a ton of shit and if something ever borks up you have to let it fail to boot X times in a row or force shut it down during boot to trigger a true full boot?
I just don't see what the point of these devices is. For MS, they want people locked into their ecosystem. For users? These things are the modern net top. Remember that fad? They'll suck compared to regular laptops and be too expensive compared to budget laptops. Compared to tablets, no one will pick it over the Google / Apple prisons. Hell, people would prefer a Kindle Fire over this thing.
A Microsoft alternative to a toy released by Google.
They're going to fly off the shelves! ... right in to bargain bins.
Does it? Wouldn't protecting against unintentional/inadvertent/accidental modification achieve the same thing, while still empowering those who know what they're doing?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The only way that would work is if there was a trivial, fool-proof way to tell if the firmware had been modified. A blinky light on the external case would probably do it... obviously the light would need to be controlled by a dedicated circuit that cannot be modified by the user. If I were administering a laptop cart full of these, I wouldn't want to have the job of periodically booting each into a bios screen - but checking for blinky lights isn't too onerous.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Can it run Linux?
I don't run ChromeOS on my Chromebooks, so why would I run Windows on this FUD-product?
I'm still waiting for a native ssh-server from microsoft. Didn't they announce that 2 yrs ago?
So no, this will not meet your needs. And that's OK, because not every product needs to be for Slashdot readers to use directly.
But on the other hand there are users who DO need such product.
If manufacturers only produce device that cater only to the most popular users, this is going to be problematic. Because nobody will produce any product that could also fill the needs of less common users.
On the otherhand, manuacturer could produce device that could, if the user is motivated enough, be converted to the needs of more peculiar users (e.g.: how easy it is to switch on developer mode on Jolla, and older HP / Palm smartphones), you end up with a device that is both cheap and mass-produced, but also can be coerced to fullfill the needs of a few atypical users who'll otherwise be left in the dust.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Those specs are ridiculously high for a budget, no-frills OS. ChromeOS runs well on machines with all of the numeric specs literally half of the listed minimum specs here.
Microsoft should focus on making their browser desirable to use, even if that means it's a carbon copy of chromium. They could make a ChromeOS variant called "SilverOS" or "BlueOS" or similar and market it as having better privacy features than ChromeOS but that sort of defeats the purpose. If they want to compete with Google in the "snoop on users" game, they should just compete on price: sell Chromebook clones that come with the same level of snooping and run ChromeOS except all of the telemetry reports to Microsoft instead of Google.
Meanwhile, they need to continue their cloud migration with Microsoft Office such that the majority of office users migrate off the desktop application on to their cloud infrastructure so they can kill the Windows operating system once and for all. There's simply no longer a profitable market for that product, or at least, demand is past the inflection point and the second derivative suggests they need to plan for it's eventual death.
in disquise. Owned part and parcel by MS and has been since the name change.
"Leaking" documents became the new marketing thing.
These restrictions have nothing to do with preventing malware or supporting ease of administration, it's DRM plain and simple.
I've never heard of this happening with a Chromebook. There are two ways to run Linux on these boxes, either in a chroot (Crouton) or to wipe the machine and install Linux.
For machines that just need a Linux app or two, I use Crouton. Crouton has a sweet Chrome plugin that pushes X Window frames to a browser tab. So, you can install a Linux desktop manager, and push the whole GUI desktop inside a tab. Or, you can install without a desktop manager at all, and just push the selected app inside a tab. This works remarkably well. Need Audacity on a Chromebook? No problem. Need Dropbox client? Again, no problem.
What's really great about this is you actually WANT Chrome to get all of its automatic updates, especially of the drivers and security. That really is a huge selling point for Chromebooks. Set it and forget it.
For machines that will really be a Linux desktop, such as my dev box, I did open up the laptop, replace the tiny SSD, and remove the silly little sticker that was preventing me from writing my own boot loader image. 10 mins., tops.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Dual color power LED: green for unmodified, red for modified.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Back in the Windows 8 era, M$ came out with the Windows 8 Bing, which was provided free to OEM's for low-spec systems, on condition they didn't change the browser's default search engine from Bing in their system image. This enabled a class of low-cost cheap-shit "Chromebook-fighter" class laptops, like the HP Stream, that combined Chromebook cost (and hardware specs). M$ is now just doing the same play with Windows 10.
Yes, it "comes up", but the startup daemons keep the system unusable for 10 minutes. Certain updates will keep the system unusable for 30 minutes or more.
...not more cloud shit...Can they not make a computer with the same specs as the one I got that's a decade old and not be cloud based, or are Window$ sales that bad? Micro$oft can't standardize a new architecture fast enough to force device sales, so they get you with a platform they have complete control over ($$$). $400 (just guessing) for 4 GB of RAM, 16-32GB is hard drive, and 1.2 Gz is not worth it in 2017. You're better off making a desktop, maybe a laptop (it'd be big), from a Raspberry Pi cluster. http://www.instructables.com/i...
They "leak" them on purpose to see what the public opinion is rather than just being honest about it so they can claim "it's not true" when things look bad and Apple and Google patent hunters don't get more ammunition against them. Heaven forbid they taste their own medicine.
MS just wants to toss another os on the trash heap of shit, known locally as the "Redmond dump". Why not focus all that wasted energy, by fixing the last one just released.
Because Edge is not bad enough already.
Your list of features is directly at odds with the goal of making a laptop that is immune to malware and brainless to administer.
Nope. These machines could easily be set up so a very deliberate and obvious action must be taken in order to be able to modify the system, possibly leaving a physical sign of some kind. Some of the other posts suggest just this, in fact.
Their present approach has at least some inclinations towards "immune to malware" until someone finds a nice, big exploit in it, but this isn't really what Microsoft is after. This is about control and power. Microsoft wants control and power over your computer, and your data, and they want it now. They showed their hand with Windows 10, they continue to show their hand with Secure Boot, and this is just an extension of their strategy, which they will pursue to the ends of the Earth.
Their end game relies on you having all of your data dependent on their cloud forever, free for them to data mine, control, and render obsolete, and you to pay for hardware that they, for all intents and purposes, own and control, whether or not you have anything to say about it. I'm surprised they haven't included an automatic bricking capability in a few years on these things, though they could easily have set it up to do just that, by having their cloud flat-out reject login attempts or something like that.
Are we talking theoretically, or are we talking practically? Because practically there are many choices out there for a cheap laptop that is capable of running arbitrary code.
Cheap : yes.
But cheap isn't the only characteristic that attract people to chromebooks.
The form factor is also another reason.
And most of the "run arbitrary code, and easily install Linux on them" devices tend to be heavy clunky workstation-class laptops
(again for obious market reasons : most linux users tend to be developers, its best to concentrate effort to create pro-laptops catering to them)
Chrome books tend to be extremely light and thin.
If you're on the market of a machine which doesn't break your back, and for which you hope to get supported drivers you best bets are in order : ChromeBooks then Windows ultraportable.
Usually, forget about MacBook Air, their weird embed controller won't get driver support quickly.
And that's for ulta-thin portable.
Then there are smartphone.
There it's very hard to find device allowing end-users to install arbitrary code. Usually you'll find it only on special hobbyist-oriented platforms, which tend to be expensive and with lower hardware specs (due to smaller production runs) like OpenMoko/GoldeDelicious FreeRunner/GTA04, like Pyra handheld console, etc.
There are a few consumer-oriented platforms that can optionally allow you to run arbitrary code : the above mentionned Jolla 1 by the former sacked R&D team of Nokia, Palm / HP's Pre (and the tendency has now halted, after switching hands to LG), etc.
And in between (still a smaller production run and a bit expensive for not-stellar specs. But more consumer-oriented than hobbyist oriented) : Fairphone 2.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]