Acer’s First Chromebook with Snapdragon 7c Is Ultraportable, 4G LTE Equipped | Hacker News Reader

Acer’s First Chromebook with Snapdragon 7c Is Ultraportable, 4G LTE Equipped

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41 pointswhereistimbo55 comments

"The Acer Chromebox CXI4 will be available in North America in Q1 2021 starting at USD 259.99; and in EMEA in Q1 2021, starting at EUR 569."

Does anyone know why Chromeboxes are so expensive outside the US?

As a young broke European I sometimes weep on how cheap computing hardware is in the US compared to here.

Like, my face radiates with joy when I read a tutorial on how to build a cheap home server with some old $15 Xeons or a cheap laptop with an old $50 x220 but my smile instantly vanishes when I look at the local second hand market and realize those Xeons are $60 and the x220 is $200 here.

Americans don't know how good they have it, high incomes, low taxes and cheap prices makes accumulating wealth and starting a business much easier than in Europe.

People in some European countries don't know how good they have it, not having to worry about things like healthcare and medicinal costs, parental leave, vacation leave, and access to higher education.

I raise you South America, where we have low income, high taxes and public healthcare which barely works so we usually end up paying for private healthcare too. Pretty much the same with education too.

No, we constantly hear how good we are supposed to have it with healthcare and education, and how it's horrible in the US.

Nobody talks about how qualified workers are earning 3x more in the US, with everyday items costing less.

Life is pretty awesome for top 10% in the US compared to European countries, and comparable for top 20%. But bottom 80% in Europe will have have better quality of life than bottom 80% in the US, which is the source of those price savings on everyday items and 3x incomes for “qualified” workers.

Not sure about your percentages, but yes in essence this is the pros and cons of socialist countries. Now the question is wether this is good for a given country in the long run, knowing that socialist countries will tend to attract poor people, and will tend to lose some of their rich people.

If there is a correlation between an individual's economic success and that individual's contribution to society, then socialist countries will become less and less competitive compared to the other countries who on the contrario will be gaining people that contribute more to society and losing people that contribute less.

Yeah all those costs are just distributed elsewhere. Like healthcare, dental, eye care, lower wages in everything other than tech, housing, lack of public transit... etc.

I feel most of what you say...

But I'm happy with high prices for technology and free healthcare and almost free education.

You can spare 500€ when you're not spending 5-10 k€ or more in hospital bills.

I actually came here to note how cheap it is in the USA.

It's amazing that there are so many cheap computing platforms available now. Not that long ago the One Laptop Per Child project seemed like a pipe dream, assuming it meant providing any reasonable quality hardware.

For the other devices the prices are fairly close considering exchange rate, VAT and added warranties. So the most likely explanation is the "Powered by up to a 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 processor" line. The base model in EMEA will be one of the higher speced ones.

I've been wondering about these things for a quite a bit. One thing is that prices in the US often get advertised without VAT, while in Europe it's included and once you factor that in many things are not that different. But in some product areas there is a huge discrepancy, and it's often US-based companies who have very big differences between US and European pricing.

I often notice it when US people complain about some price for a European product and I then look up the prices in the US out of surprise, because the US-company competitor is the same price in Europe. It then shows that the US and European prices of the European product are the same, while the US-company product is a third or more cheaper in the US than Europe (I have recently seen this with bicycles and trainers). Not sure if there are some tax or duty type reasons for this?

Well most of these comparison are not done thoughtfully enough. And in the age of Internet everyone somehow expects pricing to be the same around the world.

Price + Import Tax + Sales Tax + Exchange Rate with Hedging + Additional Coverage ( Such as Legal Requirement for Fixing within certain time ).

That is basically the formula Apple use for their product pricing. Apple gets the benefits of having economy of scale. For many other products, you will need additional cost for Distribution for each country in Europe, Operation Handling, difference packaging for certain items. All these could easily add up to additional 10-20%. You now end up having a price that is 30 - 40% more expensive than US listed price.

You can't factor in VAT to make the prices the same because Americans don't pay VAT.

Americans usually (I think) pay sales tax, unless they are in one of the very few places that doesn't have them. A VAT is just a version of a sales tax that is harder to evade.

It’s almost impossible to do a straight comparison of taxes since the level of services is buys you from different governments is different, and each government (in American states and European countries) divvy up the taxes in varied ways between income, property, sales, tolls, and probably a whole bunch of other ones.

Sales tax exists in some states but not all. It's also less than ten percent. In my state the PS5 costs $535 after tax while in the UK it costs $587.

From my comparisons, the base model in the EU is not generally better-specced than the base model in the US, and on top of that, some higher-specced versions never make it to the EU at all.

I read somewhere (can't remember where) that it may be due to the entry level version in the EU is a higher spec than the US one, hence the price difference.

That's... Weird

Sure, if you look up prices in Europe they're sightly higher. See the PS5 or the latest iPhone

But not double the price. Also I would assume that's easy to get a brand new laptop around the 200/300 EUR range

ARM-based Chromebooks are not new. But IIRC they were mostly 32-bit machines with few cores running at relatively slow clock speeds. Still they were great machines for many purposes, and very inexpensive.

What seems to be new here is that this machine is built on the Snapdragon 7C, which is an 8-core[0] 64-bit machine running at 2.4 Ghz. And it has a touchscreen, a 180-degree hinge, and it will sell for $399/£399. I'll probably buy one if I can boot real Linux on it.

[0] Not sure if those are 8 actual cores or 4 hyperthreaded cores.

8 real cores, 2x big and 6x little.

"2x Kryo 468 Gold @ 2.4GHz + 6x Kryo 468 Silver"

https://www.androidauthority.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-8c-7cx-...

I have a feeling Google, Apple, and Microsoft are leaving AMD64 in a concerted effort. All three dominate the K-12 sector.

Microsoft has already announced support for ARM with x64 emulation last month:

"We are excited about the momentum we are seeing from app partners embracing Windows 10 on ARM, taking advantage of the power and performance benefits of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors."[1]

[1] https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2020/09/30/now-m...

It's probably not "concerted"... more of Google and Microsoft doing damage control because of the expected Apple ARM domination of the near future.

Damage control of what part exactly? Are you implying they will make in house chips that go toe to toe to the A* in the near future or that Apple is going to start selling it's main hardware lead to competitors in the near future?

Without either of those it's not much of a "damage control" response as it's the same Qualcomm family of devices Google and Microsoft have been using for the last decade.

Apple's lead over Qualcomm & others in fast ARM chips should have the opposite effect, no?

I am a fan of ChromeOS and Chromebook's, even though the one I have is about six years old.

From a security perspective, it bothers me to see so many companies allow their proprietary and sensitive digital assets to float around the physical world on employee’s laptops. At Google, I liked the prohibition from keeping material on laptops.

Off subject, but I hope Google releases a new Chromebook Go soon, I would like to get a new Chromebook.

From a security perspective, ChromeOS bothers me because it has a much shorter software support lifecycle than the hardware lifespan.

We have ChromeOS devices out there are perfectly able to run the latest ChromeOS in terms of specs but aren't supported anymore by Google because of an arbitrary time-based EOL and therefore will either be browsing the web unpatched or thrown away.

Whereas any other x86 computer from the last 12+ years or so can have up-to-date Windows or Linux put on it.

Another step on our march to disposable everything.

From a security perspective, it bothers me to see so many companies willing to put their golden eggs on Google's computers.

I wonder if these Qualcomm chip Chromebooks will get the usual ChromeOS 6-8 years of support versus Qualcomm's dismal three year of security updates for phones.

My Lenovo Duet claims to be supported until 2028 (it's a MediaTek though).

I greatly fear the day these devices become Mainstream. The have completely non-standardized hardware which makes it impossible to run linux on it in a sane manner.

It's ironic that this year's real landslide turn towards ARM chips for chromebooks came because of Intel's years long problem with low end chip availability, and them completely disregarding the Atom/now Pentium lineup.

Does anyone know when the Acer Enduro start to sell? I can't find any products on the store, but the product news already come out for several months.

I still can't believe they opted to center an OS around a browser instead of integrating a browser into an OS. And the most astonishing thing is - people buy it. And then, only if you jump through the hoops, they let you run normal apps but from a container. How magnanimous of them. Something is awfully messed up with the tech world.

I'd argue that to most people the browser _IS_ the centre of their computer-based universe anyway!

If I use my own family as an example:

My wife spends all her time at her computer in Microsoft Edge (she has a Mac and Safari doesn't work properly with a load of sites she uses)

My son only plays games on his Switch and when he gets a computer next year, I'd bet it will be for surfing the web and playing streaming games

My mum and dad only use the browser on the Windows PC they have (and the iPad too)

My use case involves dev work and uni work so I can't use a Chromebook.

People want zero-friction. If they can open a browser, or better, click a link at the bottom on the taskbar that opens their "application" then they don't care what's behind it.

Chromebooks definitely have their place... that being said, Google's customer service leaves a lot to be desired and putting all your eggs in that basket is a risky proposition.

True, but that still doesn't justify crippling a device. If it was the other way around - browser (and apps) integrated seamlessly in the desktop, all use cases will be covered, including yours. And we'd be having a powerful and sleek OS that can do everything for everyone without the weight of the windows/mac behemoth.

With the mere action of including lxc in it later, it shows how much full functionality is wanted in such a device. But it's ass-backwards now.

Starting with the core use case for most people seems like a smart engineering and business decision. Chromebooks value proposition is to be the simplest, safest and cheapest laptops to access the web. It makes it clear what people will be able to do with it and makes it different enough to more general laptop to be marketable. Building this on ChromeOS seems like the simplest way to reach those goal. Extending Chrome means that most of the UX is already understood by users and the codebase is already built with many of the same goals in mind.

I completely understand wanting to have more capabilities on these Chromebooks though. I ran elementaryOS on an HP Chromebook for many years and it was amazing for the price. A great battery life, good keyboard and touchpad and a full blown OS that is also lightweight and snappy. But I think that the annoying thing is that the same hardware isn't sold by the manufacturer without ChromeOS.

Ten years ago Google sent me a Cr-48[1] and I spent two years as a beta tester. I always assumed it was to be some sort of web terminal, but beefier than a netbook. I am stunned how far it has progressed (he writes on his Chromebook)...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Cr-48

It was a lifesaver in university. I barely had the $60 I needed for a used Chromebook -- it gave easy access to all the online gradebooks and assignment postings, I had ready access to google docs and overleaf, the battery lasted all day even with 8+ hours of active use, with crouton I had a nearly complete Linux CLI (math major here, jupyter with sympy was extremely useful). As an added bonus it weighed in under 3lbs; due to unforeseen circumstances I was biking a fair ways to school each day, and after a textbook or two every extra pound mattered.

Was a Chromebook the only workable solution? No, of course not. Having _something_ was a huge advantage over hoping the library would be open some time you weren't in class or working (a tenuous proposition, especially near weekends or anything that might be misconstrued as a holiday), and in that price bracket there was no competition that came close to a Chromebook.

> browser instead of integrating a browser into an OS.

I don't think the average user cares, as long as they can do what they need to do. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

> instead of integrating a browser into an OS

Microsoft tried that with IE, and got sued. They ended up having to add a 'carousel' of alternate browser options during a users first login.

Guessing no-one wants to tempt fate like that again.

The browser has take on many of the original functions of the OS in terms of hardware abstraction. And much more reliably than a traditional OS. For evidence of this just look at the chrome special pages on GPU support.

Isn't Acer extremely unreliable?

They used to be. From what I can tell from personal experience they have fixed a lot of their QC problems. I suspect they had a push to capture market share by simply being cheapest with disregard for quality in the late 2000s/early 2010s. The build quality in their laptops from back then were atrocious. Nowadays it seems to be on par with other manufacturers.

Not in my experience. I have two Acer Notebooks. They don't get much use now simply because they are a bit underpowered for a lot of current software but they have been working flawlessly for years.

Chrome OS team i.e. Google does the bring up + testing on these not Acer.

Not a good endorsement. Google sells very shitty hardware and on top of it their customer support sucks.

Is it 2018? We have 5G now.

I would much prefer 4G instead of paying premium for 5G. 4G is fast enough for me and it is hard to find 5G reception. Also recent battery tests of iPhones which suggest 5G uses more battery is discouraging as well. I would much rather have better battery life.

It's not high end. For 5G you want Snapdragon 8cx gen 2 based devices.

https://www.greymodelagency.com/cultmen

Today I have learned that if the forehead is being relaxed, one can manage sleep cycle. Perhaps that's because the chidakasha being connected to pineal gland.

Doesn't need 5G, I don't even see why it needs 4G even. Most laptops are used in wifi range.

Are those customers wiling to pay extra for 5G Modem, Antenna and patents for their Chromebook?

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