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.

Comments

The Russians

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Leaked Document Sheds Light On Microsoft's Chromebook Rival

The Russians did what now?

go Microsoft

[iggymanz]

Q: what do you call a stalker who waits six years before taking a step to follow target

A: not much of a threat

Cloud: insecure, unreliable. Just say no.

[Anonymous Coward]

this might be a good thing.

As long you can completely turn off the "cloud' thing, yes.

It will go unnoticed

[bobjr94]

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.

Re:It will go unnoticed

[Oswald McWeany]

I don't have any desire to get a Windows "Chrome" Book- we have a couple of Chromebooks at home for the kids, but I won't be getting them a Microsoft equivalent one unless it is demonstrably better.

That said the "Under 20 second Cold Boot" isn't a goal- it's a worst case scenario. They very well might boot in 6 seconds just like a Chromebook does. Until it is released we can't know. They're saying the very worst device in this classification would have to be able to boot in 20 seconds, not the best, nor the average, but the worst.

Price?

[Frederic54]

It depends on the price, if it is ~$249 it will be nice especially if we can install a linux distro on it!

Competition

[Danathar]

Keep in mind Microsoft would of NEVER done this had Google not had success with the Chromebook model.

Re:Could be useful

[MightyYar]

No, that would ruin it for this niche. You can buy a cheap laptop right now that is not locked down. The benefit to a Chromebook or Chromebook clone like these is that you can hand it to a school age kid and not worry at all about viruses, malware, misconfiguration, etc. It just works all the time.

I completely agree that it makes these things unattractive to a large number of Slashdotters. I'm one of them, and I only have Chromebooks for the kids and wife, not myself. I have spent _zero_ hours screwing around with the Chromebooks*, which is something I cannot say about any other computer that I've ever owned.

* So technically, I did screw around with them because I'm a big dork. I played with developer mode, but my wife blew away my efforts by hitting the space bar on boot. Which is for the best. Also, printing can be hard to set up but I got lucky because I already had Chrome set up to share a printer.

Re:Can I reformat the Hard Drive and install Linux

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:Could be useful

[MightyYar]

How do I discern between a laptop with SecureBoot turned on and one that has corrupted firmware that pretends to have SecureBoot turned on? If this takes more than a few seconds, then your product is less compelling to one that is simply locked down.

Rather than HW Specs, what is SW Infrastructure?

[mykepredko]

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?

Schools won't want it

[ITRambo]

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.