Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks are designed for everything to be in the cloud, always. If you're DOWNLOADING anything to the device, you're using it wrong.

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.

you're being down voted but you are correct, schools buy these by the hundreds. everything is stored in the cloud. these devices are aimed at a different market. chrome book and Google classroom and Google docs is what they are for. apps make them nicer, there are tons of educational apps (think dyslexia, autism, etc) that we need iPads for. Now we can ditch the iPads.

I think the downvoting is around the assumption that there's a "right" way to use them. Personally I do store a lot of content in Google's cloud but I also have a large SD card in my Chromebook that works perfectly well.

It's being advertised as being suitable for movies and games. Personally I can only successfully stream movies when I'm not on the go with a laptop.

dogma's point about the Play Store apps is right though. ChromeOS was designed to keep everything in the cloud, but Android apps are different-- while currently running on storage-constrained tablets and phones, the Play Store on a laptop will feel a lot more like the App store on a Mac-- games especially will have tons of giant assets that will ideally be stored locally. But if you only have 32GB for a 500GB game... there's a problem.

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...

Even a phone/tablet like experience. The "AAA" mobile titles and the older PC ports take a lot of space, Xcom takes like 4GB, Shadow Run takes 2-3 GB, GTA takes like 2-3 GB also... Even on my Motorola Droid the first "AAA" 3D mobile games would download 1-2GB of assets. A movie from Netflix / Google Play can be 4-6 GB also since it's 2-3GB per hour.

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.

So the Games games that they advertise in the god damn press release that need to download like 4+ GB of data once you install them from the store which cannot be stored on SD or in the magic "cloud" of yours are meant for what?

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.....

> 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.

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.

NTFS and exFAT are useless since Android can't mount SD cards that are formatted with those properly. You may be able to hack the OS to read from them but then they can't be mounted for general purpose use. If you are running Android 6.0 you can mount the SD card as internal storage if you format it in EXT4 and encrypt it which also locks the SD card to your that phone and you can't swap it in and out since it will break apps and as it's encrypted you can't transfer files to it manually.

>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.

> NTFS and exFAT are useless since Android can't mount SD cards that are formatted with those properly.

That might be relevant if this was an Android device and not a ChromeOS device that can also run Android apps.

ChromeOS is also locked ;) Android apps on it are even more restricted.

> do not allow you to use removable storage for that purpose

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 doesn't do it either...

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.