Still only 32GB eMMC, this is not excusable anymore; there is no 4G modem in this, only wifi, a portable device without storage is pointless can barely fit 2 1080 movies on it....
Removable storage is pointless since they would likely not to support a filesystem which can be easily mounted on any computer (windows/linux/osx) and support files of 4GB or greater in size.
More importantly media apps like Amazon Instant Video, Netflix and Spotify which allow you to cache/download media for offline use do not allow you to use removable storage for that purpose and my downloaded spotify songs alone would fill A 32GB device.
I can download a few seasons of my TV shows from Amazon Video, Netflix and my entire music library from Spotify into my iPhone but I can't download even a full season of a 8-10 episode per season show onto a device with 32GB.
32GB eMMC is also very slow because of how the storage channel works, so sorry there is no excuse with having so little storage.
Also SD cards are slow, die fairly quickly, can easily get lost, and buying 256GB of storage in microSDXC Class 10 cards from a reliable source (as in definitely not fake) costs about as much as the difference between an iPad/iPhone with a 32GB and 256GB here in the UK.
When you buy a Chromebook, you're signing up for a cheap, lightweight cloud access device. That's why they (used to?) come bundled with 1TB of Google Drive storage.
When a device has a keyboard and 12" screen, it'll feel like a laptop and you'll expect a laptop-like installation experience, not a phone-like experience. That means not waiting a half hour for your game media to download every time you want to play a level...
If you have a Marshmallow device today with an SD card you can lock the SD card to that device, format it in EXT4 and encrypt it and then never really remove it and apps can be installed on it (usually), if you still running an older version of Android you have to root the device and pray that the app doesn't do root detection format the SDcard in EXT4 and mount it in /DATA (?) and even then you might have issues since the SD card reader on many devices can be quite slow.
If Samsung wants to sell 500$ devices with 32GB it's their choice, but why not offer models with more storage? Why all the chinese phones can come with 64GB as a base for 300-400$ but Apple and Samsung still offer 32GB for flagship devices that cost twice as much?
And more importantly why are people OK with it? seriously "X is more than enough" when in fact it isn't is not an excuse, the fact that you can get by with 32GB doesn't mean you should, your use cases fit your storage capability not the otherway around.
When I bought the 128GB 6s I thought I would never fill it, within a couple of weeks I only had 30 GB left on the device.
What about apps that can be as big as few GB's these days for prosumer apps?
What about the cache that the apps use that cannot be stored on an SD card or in the cloud?
What about the fact that internet is still not available everywhere and the fact that these devices do not come with cellular networking built-in?
They sure want me to use the device wrong since they advertise media and games rather than cloud storage.
A school doesn't need computers, it need remote terminals for that most Chromebooks are fine since they'll be used only in a networked environment.
This is a premium device touted as a laptop replacement; don't sell me the cloud. Neither cloud nor Google Storage isn't mentioned even once in the press-release.
In fact in the 1st paragraph you have:
"And with apps like Google Play Movies and Spotify™, you can download movies, shows and music to keep watching or listening when you’re on the go."
Oh but wait, 32GB.....
You are complaining about Samsung's hardware being inexcusable, yet you consider an unnecessary software restriction to be acceptable? I was not aware that Amazon Instant Video, Netflix and Spotify had such restrictions but I do consider that restriction to be inexcusable and would use other software instead.
Google, Netflix, Amazon etc. are doing it for "DRM" purposes, sure it stinks but but Google pretty much dropped support for installing apps on SD cards from Android all together until it returned with Marshmallow, so even if you exclude DRM they can't even offer that functionally reliably on Android since not everyone is running 6.0.
If you are running Android 6.0 then you can use the SD card for phone storage if you format it as EXT4 and encrypt the SD card using the built-in encryption in Android which effectively locks the SD card to that device. This also prevents you from swapping SD cards in and out since it will break your apps and your phone basically.
http://www.howtogeek.com/262630/how-to-work-with-external-dr...
Both exFAT and NTFS supports files bigger than 4GB.
> my downloaded spotify songs alone would fill A 32GB device.
You just invalided your argument, no single music gets to more than 4GB.
> 32GB eMMC is also very slow because of how the storage channel works, so sorry there is no excuse with having so little storage.
You keep giving examples with media. eMMC is fast enough for media playback. It is not ideal for, say, random file access, however it is getting better.
> Also SD cards are slow, die fairly quickly, can easily get lost, and buying 256GB of storage in microSDXC Class 10 cards from a reliable source (as in definitely not fake) costs about as much as the difference between an iPad/iPhone with a 32GB and 256GB here in the UK.
Good for you. Here in Brazil an iPhone 7 256GB is twice as expensive than the base 32GB model. FYI, this is a R$2000 difference, while a good, professional grade 256GB SD card is half of this price.
And btw, you're assuming that you need to buy one SD card to put everything on it. You could buy multiple smaller SD cards (say 32GB or 64GB cards), that are very fast and high quality and get much more storage than one unique 256GB SD card (that are expensive since they're pushing the quantity of flash that you can put in a small space like microSD). Smaller cards have much better price per GB.
>You just invalided your argument, no single music gets to more than 4GB.
What? it's not about a single music file getting bigger than 4GB it's about the 3000 music files that Spotify allows me to download reach considerably more than that when you download them on higher quality.
>You keep giving examples with media. eMMC is fast enough for media playback. It is not ideal for, say, random file access, however it is getting better.
You should really look at storage benchmarks and see just how "well" the 7 plus does "raw" photos on the 32GB model, especially in rapid mode.
>> Also SD cards are slow, die fairly quickly, can easily get lost, and buying 256GB of storage in microSDXC Class 10 cards from a reliable source (as in definitely not fake) costs about as much as the difference between an iPad/iPhone with a 32GB and 256GB here in the UK. Good for you. Here in Brazil an iPhone 7 256GB is twice as expensive than the base 32GB model. FYI, this is a R$2000 difference, while a good, professional grade 256GB SD card is half of this price. And btw, you're assuming that you need to buy one SD card to put everything on it. You could buy multiple smaller SD cards (say 32GB or 64GB cards), that are very fast and high quality and get much more storage than one unique 256GB SD card (that are expensive since they're pushing the quantity of flash that you can put in a small space like microSD). Smaller cards have much better price per GB.
>Good for you. Here in Brazil an iPhone 7 256GB is twice as expensive than the base 32GB model. FYI, this is a R$2000 difference, while a good, professional grade 256GB SD card is half of this price.
And? how does offering a 256 model affects you? In the UK buying 4 64GB cards not of Amazon where even the Amazon fulfilled orders are at best only about 50% chance of getting an authentic card if you are ordering a decent brand will cost you about 150-160 GBP since Currys/JL etc sell them for about 40 GBP, an iPhone 7/7p costs 180 GBP more for the 256GB model.
That might be relevant if this was an Android device and not a ChromeOS device that can also run Android apps.
it says: MicroSD Multi-media Card Reader
So bung in a 128GB or 256GB microSD card and you're good to go. For $449 ? That's pretty decent. If my mother hadn't just got at my suggestion the (frankly astonishing) Lenovo Yoga Book Android version for $499 I'd be recommending this Samsung Chromebook to her.
General Media is also a problem, I can install VLC on my Chromebook but I can't access media on my SD card, even tho ChromeOS supports exFAT.
So people can go on and say SD card this SD card that, but currently SD cards are not usable at all, they are also not designed for random access, eMMC is at least somewhat decent at that. SDcard readers on many devices are often accessed over USB which makes them even slower and less reliable.
And the design of the SDreader itself often doesn't lend well to permanent storage which means that SD cards cannot be physically used as reliable system storage.
A 256GB micro SD card costs in the UK 150-170 GBP, you can get it for about 130-140 if you want to play 256GB or 256MB Amazon roulette.
Apple Charges 170 GBP for the 256GB upgrade over the 32GB one, yes this is more per GB than an SD card but this is considerably faster and more reliable storage and you can actually use it as both system and general use storage which means that any app or general purpose use of the phone would be able to take full advantage of it unlike SD cards on Android/ChromeOS which range from utterly useless to very limited.
500$ Chromebook with 32GB of storage is utterly useless, considering the price of eMMC it's also inexcusable, so is the fact that iPads come with 32GB still at a similar price point, but at least those offer a higher capacity option.
It seems that the Chinese makers do 64GB as base now, probably will soon go to 128 since when they play around the same price point they need to win on features, I'll wait for a Chromebook from them or see if Asus is going to launch a 256 or 512GB version.
Like honestly I'm really baffled by the level of technical inaccuracy in the counterpoints and the downvotes people that talk about SD cards seem to not actually own a Chromebook nor use it as Google wants you to do now which is as a platform for Android Apps since there are virtually no Chrome Apps anymore and everything is from the Play Store.
Slow external storage that doesn't interface properly is no replacement for a fast internal drive.A m.2 slot isn't that big. There's no excuse to not add one.
i have the same concern, its a deal breaker for me. if i am paying $500, why cant i have some decent storage so i can do things offline and store movies and what not. i dont / cant stream 100% of the time
That used to be the case but now you're installing Android apps - which are often fairly hefty.
But currently Android Apps running on Chromebooks under ARC Containers don't even have proper read access from the SD card write is out of the question completely....
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=660189...
I currently use the Samsung Note 2014 (with the Wacom digitizer) as my portable Media player with pretty expensive 64GB cards and it's not fun, they are easy to lose and you still need to swap cards and the media transfer speed to those cards unless you pop them into a reader is so freaking slow and then you get into problems because you can't easily copy large files to them (as in 720+ movies and 1080 ~1 hour TV shows) since exFAT or NTFS is often not supported which defeats the purpose anyhow.
And if "less than official digital copies" are not you thing then both Amazon and Netflix allow you to download videos on mobile devices and play them back while offline, and they do not allow you to use your SD card for the cache.
But: "a portable device without storage is pointless can barely fit 2 1080 movies on it...."
is not true. I imagine a vast majority of the population carries a portable device that can't fit 2 1080p movies. Indeed, the number of people watching 1080p movies on their phone is probably pretty small to begin with.
A phone with 32GB is also not excusable when camera photos take up 5-10MB today, and most phones can shoot 4K video.
And as for the users they buy what they have, most devices don't offer more it doesn't mean they shouldn't the OnePlus One had this too and the 16GB version was pretty much killed because the overwhelming majority of the orders were for the 64GB version and this was like what nearly 3 years ago...
But with that being said, 32gb is fine for any use you will have with a tablet. If you have an iPad 32gb, your music, photos, contacts, everything is in the cloud. You jump on to wi-fi when you can, and in between hotspots you just use the space that's on your iPad. That's for normal, every day use. If you have to go on an extended trip or something, you have to reconsider.
Please keep in mind I think the 32gb sucks, I just think that most people can get buy with it and it's plenty excusable.
Contacts don't take space, and photos in the cloud are a backup, it's not like you can easily browse 5-10MB photos even if you are connected to a metro-wifi connection it's not going to be fast enough in most cases.
How you use your device changes with the storage you have. I don't need to worry about what I store on my device so I have VLC with movies and TV shows just in case. I have seasons of shows from Netflix/Amazon just in case. I got all my music downloaded so I won't have to stream from Spotify killing my battery and warming up my pocket for no reason. I got audiobooks, podcasts, documents and everything I need just in case.
And I found out that the "just in case" is used all the time when you have the option, missed a train? well got 18 min I can watch another episode of star wars rebels instead of idling or trying to stream from my Plex server over the wifi at a train station. Met a friend you haven't seen in a long time? well I got my videos and photos all ready to show... Bored? Well I'll play XCOM or Magic the Gathering....
GB's left GB's right, sure this is just wasting time, nothing life changing but people just don't realise how limited they are because they don't have more storage not because they need it badly but because they are conditioned to get by without it.
I'm not a typical case here though just mentioning my habits for fun.
I'm not expecting a 50-150$ phone to come with 256GB option, even tho they would also support 4K today or soon enough, go on GSM arena you'll be hard pressed to see
Paying ~500$ for a device or more and only getting 32GB is a ripoff, the funny part is that many of the new (and current) "chinese" phones from makers like Oppo, Meizu, Huawei, Xiaomi which are intended for the international market come with 64GB as their base and offer 128GB versions.
There are other features besides storage that justify spending money for some people. Storage may be decisive for you, but having different preferences doesn't mean people are getting ripped off.
It's more of a tablet with an keyboard and a 12" screen than a traditional laptop.
I'm thinking it's the first thing that I'd see as a suitable replacement for my Galaxy Note Pro 12.2 with keyboard case -- a more modern tool with some key utility and convenience updates that is well suited for the same roles.