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Comment by vachina | Hacker News Reader

Why can’t companies be honest with themselves. Nobody wants underpowered x86 laptops running a glorified thin client OS.

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My mom actually really likes her Chromebook Pixel and I'm not sure what to replace it with now that it isn't supported.

For a lot of users the browser is the whole computer anyway. Windows is now full of ads and User Engagement popups.

It's tough to find an Apple-hardware-level device in the Chromebook space though. There are a few, but this new Chromebook Plus spec seems more like a bare minimum than a premium segment.

They could do something like:

Chromebook

Chromebook Plus

Chromebook Ultra

Although I can’t really see why you’d need a tricked out Chromebook. Maybe when WebGPU / WebAssembly gains widespread adoption?

I don't really care about having better specs other than a decent processor and SSD. iPad-level performance is fine. ARM is probably the better choice here.

But having a nice keyboard, trackpad, and high res display are good. A lot of Chromebooks really cheap out on the display, even the Chromebook Plus spec only calls for 1080p.

A nice premium-feeling durable computing product covers a lot more than just the raw cpu/gpu speed.

That's really what the original Chromebook Pixel was. Great build quality, high res display, good keyboard/trackpad, and just enough horsepower to run ChromeOS.

I'm using an old 11" Asus on my current trip but it's out of support and I probably won't use it again. With no more Google hardware which a liquid spill killed, not sure what I'll do for travel going forward. <aybe my 13 yo MacBook Pro going forward for a while while I keep a newer MacBook mostly at home. Maybe an Air at some point. Probably not worth another Chromebook at this point even if it's cheap.

Does your 13 yo MBP have the horrid GPU in it? Can't remember the year they started, but my 2011 MBP had one. My cheap ass would probably still be using it if it didn't freeze every time a GPU request was made, which is everything now. Once the browsers wanted GPU acceleration, the thing was unusuable

I think my old MBP is a 2015. In any case, it works fine tor mostly browser-stuff which is all I really use it for on my dining room rable day to day. So more like 8 years old. My 2010's battery swelled and it wasn't worth fixing at that point after I personally did a couple other upgrades to it.

ChromeOS is surprisingly solid, between the Android and Linux support you can run basically anything short of heavy desktop games on it.

For all the Chrome memes, ChromeOS's desktop environment is really snappy (even on a passively cooled dualcore throttling down to 500MHz) and uses up basically no RAM (once you dig into the terminal and top, and realize the task manager reports cache as used… sigh).

The fact that Chromebooks sell seems to indicate that you are mistaken.

It's not a thin client. Hasn't been for a long while. Has Android and Linux layers which runs apps / programs locally and offline. There's also several web apps that can be run offline, including Google's own. Certain models have Steam support. Chrome OS devices are closer to being general purpose computing devices than iPads.

You could run one as a thin client and have a great time with it. But it's no longer limited to being thin.

Google is the king of killing unprofitable businesses yet Chromebooks live.

Are Chromebooks not profitable? They seem to have done a great job with the education sector.

That's my point, they live because they're most likely profitable.

Got it - I misunderstood.

I think that's their point - if Chromebooks were unprofitable, they would have been killed off years ago. Instead, they're thriving and being expanded upon.

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