Hacker News Reader

Comment by monochromatic | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to figure out what in the world people are going to use these for. Single-app kiosk? Sure, but that's gotta be a tiny market. TV streaming box? Maybe, but it's not clear to me that it really offers anything I care about that isn't already done by Chromecast/Roku.

I dunno. It's kind of a cool idea, but it feels like a solution in search of a problem.

View on HN

I think there is a demographic of casual internet users who might be interested in this product. It's inexpensive and occupies little space, one need only provide peripherals and a monitor. It runs ChromeOS, which is reputed to be very secure (except from Google) and easy to use. Yes, the kiosk application seems of dubious value, if only because people tend to prefer touchscreen kiosks. But I don't believe you are correct that this solves no problem. Where before one might buy a $300 HP tower for one's grandmother, this product is a less expensive and possibly superior alternative.

I am definitely buying one of these for my parents/grandparents when they need a new computer. All they do is use Facebook/YouTube/Skype and sometimes editing and printing some documents. More often than not these devices require next to 0 maintenance for both software and hardware, which is a major plus when all they buy is very cheap Windows computers which require constant maintenance on both sides.

Although, cheap computers are certainly not hard to come by. A Thinkpad T60 is about $60 used, and its performance is similar to this device.

Maybe so, but I imagine one's grandmother would respond with more glee to receive this sleek little dongle than a clunky used Thinkpad T60. I'm not arguing that anyone in particular should go out and buy this product, only that some people are likely to do so of their own accord.

This I what I'm thinking. Good solution for someone that is not really into computers and technology.

Some (older) people have biases towards laptops (since their experience is limited mostly to older crappy laptops) and just suggesting that a laptop would be better than their current, ancient, desktop is met with refusal and denial.

I know this situation since my mother falls into this camp. When she last moved I tried to convince her to buy a laptop, but she refused. Later I got her Chromebook which she likes on travels, but still refused to use at home, but continuously complains how slow her desktop is.

I'm seriously considering if getting one of these for her would fix the situation. She could still use her old keyboard, mouse and display, but I bet performance would go through the roof (compared to her old PC), but I don't know how compatible things like printers and scanners are with this and would running mouse, keyboard, printer, scanner and external HDD off of same USB port introduce some bottlenecking

You can get a touch panel and put it over the screen. A lot of them just work with X server. Connect to the usb port and you're done.

I don't know that ChromeOS uses X server (I know almost nothing about it, in fact). But by the time you've paid for the additional hardware, it may be the case that it's cheaper to buy a tablet or a professional-grade IDS display.

ChromeOS doesn't use X11 any more. It uses a custom graphics stack called Ozone[1] that runs on top of libDRM on Linux and uses features such as hardware overlays which are common now that X11 knows nothing about.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/ozone

Personally I'm using a similar form factor atom-based stick in a body-worn computer to handle animatronics and lighting for a costuming project. The Raspberry Pi isn't powerful enough to handle the tasks that I need to do, and the $100 price is a lot cheaper than industrial boards.

For a home-based solution, it seems like a solution for non-hackers to set up a computer for the kids, etc that they don't have to worry about. For schools, it's a cheap way to turn surplus monitors into computers for student use. For an office type layout, I can see these as being useful for people who don't need more than google apps and the like. If there's a problem, a reboot will fix it, if it's more than that, the help desk person can just pull a replacement out of their pocket. Tiny's pretty useful when you need to deal with the logistics of a few hundred desktops throughout their lifespan.

It seems like it could be a cheap videoconferencing unit. Take a spare monitor, slap this in the back, add a webcam, and use video Hangouts. Everyone could have one at their desk for not much money. We have a custom solution we use in the office that I'm sure is way more expensive.

If you think traditional touch kiosk then the market is probably small. But think digital signage. I work at a small university and we have digital signs going up everywhere. We see them for directions, coffee shop menus/pricing, cafe menu/pricing, dining hall menus and the commons areas is littered with them. The digital signage marketplace is expected to be ~$23 billion by 2020.

Digital signage could be a big market. Right now, the TV screens in an airport or rail station are massively expensive to wire up and maintain because their video feeds are all computed centrally and distributed over wires. This could let LaGuardia just slap a bunch of consumer TVs together and build a web app to deliver the content over a dedicated WiFi network.

Groupon wrote the Greenscreen[1] app for Chromecast for precisely this application.

[1] https://github.com/groupon/greenscreen

I mostly agree that this is a solution in search of a problem, but I have two problems these things solve for me...

Not relevant for this one, but I've been keeping my eye on this market since it has cheap x86 devices for doing dynamic malware analysis on real hardware, rather than VMs which can be detected. Sadly I haven't seen anything with PXE or Intel's network boot tech, which would make life a lot easier, but maybe I can flash one.

I might get this one to manage app store uploads/SaaS deployments for some side projects, since having all my key material isolated on a totally separate computer would make me feel a lot better that other people won't get as easily hacked if I mess up the security of my dev machine.

My mom loves her chromebook, but uses it plugged in to a monitor, mouse and keyboard 100% of the time.

Remember WebTV? It seemed like they were pretty popular at one point, if perhaps not so profitable.

WebTV had a clunky UI and was limited to an SD TV screen. 1080p screens are pretty commonplace now. Turning your living room TV into a multi-use computer with a wireless mouse/trackpad unit (about 30 bucks) could be a good investment for some households.

I think it solves the problem of having to carry around a screen, mouse and keyboard with your everywhere. It turns your portable computing device from an all-in one, to the bare essentials. So, if all of places you use your laptop at all have these things (e.g. home/office/cafe), then you can carry your computer in your pocket, and plug-n-play when you get to the destination.

How good is it as a gaming device?

The killer could be the possibility to turn it into a Steam machine.

Well, it has 2GBs of RAM so (given you can install a different OS) and that will be the limiting factor for the vast majority of recently released games. You might be able use it for some retro or minimal games though. There are plenty of alternatives, which I was surprised by, on Amazon around $100-150 with Windows installed[0] so you might have some luck.

[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-Compute-Stick-Windows-Upgrade/...

If you already have a keyboard, monitor and mouse or can get them cheap you get a cheap Chrome PC.

I suppose that's a market. Google isn't Apple. Not every product is an attempt at a revolution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com