Chromebook (Exynos 5, 2GB) Takes Top Place In Laptop Sales On Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Chromebook (Exynos 5, 2GB) Takes Top Place In Laptop Sales On Amazon

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My mom was recently diagnosed with cancer, shortly thereafter her house was burgled and someone stole her laptop and phone.

I bought her the chromebook off amazon and brought it to her. I had to create a gmail account for her as she was required to have one for this machine.

While the price was right, I was REALLY disappointed that the farking camera doesn't work in these yet! Neither does chrome Remote Desktop.

My mom has a tracheotomy right now and cannot speak, so doing Skype/FaceTime/video calls is important for her to see my kids.

Overall, I'd rate this machine a 4/10 based on the limited functionality, the limited storage and apps and the rather clunky UX.

The physical form-factor is really nice, but the thing, at half the cost of an iPad has maybe 1/100th the functionality. I can browse the web and create a google doc. That's it.

The camera works just fine... I've used mine regularly for meetings via Google Hangouts since I picked it up a month after release.

As for storage, what exactly are you trying to store on the device? It really seems to only be intended for use as a dumb terminal to Google services, and in the current iteration I've yet to find a reason to use the local storage.

My biggest beef is the inability to locally cache music and video from Google Play. I think if this functionality existed, I would agree that the local storage is inadequate.

I think you also get 100 GB of Google Drive storage with the new Chromebooks.

But it's limited for 1 or 2 years. After that you have to pay if you want that extra storage.

What do you mean the camera doesn't work? Is it defective? Or do you mean you can't use Skype with it? And did you honestly expect Facetime to work on it?

I suggest you use Google Talk or Google+ Hangouts. If you care that much about using Skype, I think you can use https://imo.im. I know you can login with Skype, but I've never checked to see if video-calling works.

I dont have the machine in front of me and it was more than a month since I set it up, but I could not get any sort of video calling function going when I was setting it up. I could use the camera to take pics of myself - but otherwise it wouldnt work. I can't recall the exact issues....

It wasn't defective - it just wasn't something that my bedridden mom would be able to use intuitively.

I can give you that. Google Plus Hangouts isn't exactly intuitive in any way. I am sure Google would love to hear from you what they can do to improve Hangouts though. Any thoughts?

A random user would probably just use video chat inside GTalk rather than Hangouts.

I believe video chats have been replaced with hangouts (same icon launches a hangout instead of video chat).

I got a prompt asking me to do this the first time when the functionality was enabled, and now all my video chats are hangouts. Makes sense to me, as it's essentially the same functionality + the ability to invite multiple people to the video chat + include additional apps that add to the video chat functionality (live editing Google Docs, for example).

I have to say, I was pretty disappointed with the actual quality of audio calls (not a huge fan of video chatting with friends) when compared to Skype. I've tried many times over the past few years, but Skype still kicks Google's ass in terms of call quality. Is mine an exception to the general rule, or is this true for most people?

I had the same issue with my Galaxy S3 where trying to get my dad to understand how to use Google+ hangouts for video conferencing was very hard.

Having the hangouts be part of the Google+ infrastructure is hurting it's uptake because most people see Google+ as something they don't bother using because they're on Facebook instead.

Google could do a much better job integrating Google Talk video or Hangouts in Android, and VOIP in general, the way Apple has done with Facetime.

But either they don't care that much about it, or they are afraid of the carriers reaction - but they really shouldn't be. The users should always come first.

I'm very sorry you had trouble with yours.

I have a Cr-48, and the Camera has worked fine for me for doing Google Hangouts. I also can use my laptop to do Chrome Remote Desktop to another machine - but I cannot use Chrome Remote Desktop to drive the Chromebook.

Isn't $327 about the same as an iPad Mini?

The used & new price 'starts at $250' but there aren't any actually available at that price when you follow the link, and even that would be more like 3/4 the price.

Worth pointing out that CrOS's "secure boot" is somewhat unique among mainstream OSes in that it still respects the user's wishes by design[0] (aka developer mode), unlike iOS, WinRT, and (with some exceptions) Android devices.

[0] http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/f...

New HTC, Motorola and Samsung devices have unlocked bootloaders, not to mention the generally superior Nexus brand anyway. The "exception" is locked bootloaders and that's pretty much a Verizon thing these days.

The success of the Chromebook contrasts curiously with the death (?) of the netbook:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/31/netbooks-de...

I never bought a "netbook" -- always had top-end notebooks for travel and desktops for home/office, so there never was a reason to consider a netbook for myself. However, I just bought three Chromebooks for family members this Christmas because, compared with tablets, Chromebooks are nearly as good for content consumption and far better for content creation.

Tablets, combined with popular online destinations and SaaS offerings, appear to have changed the market potential for newer netbooks such as the Chromebook.

Netbooks were great for travel where you didn't want to lug around a big laptop, and I'd argue that ultrabooks are essentially a new name for netbooks. Even full-size desktop-replacement laptops have got a lot thinner (and with better battery life) than they were five years ago. So I don't think the netbook has failed; it's just been subsumed into the wider laptop market.

My girlfriend got a netbook for $199 in 2009. Where's the ultrabook in that price range?

> ultrabooks are essentially a new name for netbooks.

The raison d'être of netbooks was not portability, it was the ridiculously low price.

> I don't think the netbook has failed; it's just been subsumed

No. Netbooks were new, trendy, selling well and overall successful. Everybody and their dog had them, bought them and would have kept buying replacements if they werent panically removed from the market and replaced with subnotebooks/ultrabooks at 2-4 times the initial netbook price.

Smart phones had a significant impact.

The original eee pc 701 had a small keyboard; a small (but I think nice) display and limited soldered in SSD storage. (4 gb). This was released 2007.

That's the same year the first iPhone was released. While netbooks are useful for some people a lot of people just need to read email, noodle about on the web, and play games.

I agree that it's really annoying that really cheap, portable, limited function machines are not available. Chromebooks are probably the closest, but the cloud thing is a bit of a worry for me.

On a Chromebook you're just using the web, and for that it's pretty fast - iPad-fast (or faster) - unless you're keeping like 20 tabs open, which is something you don't do on an iPad.

But on Windows-based netbooks, every other program, and the OS itself seem pretty slow, which is probably why people don't feel like buying them anymore. Surface RT and all the Atom touchscreen hybrids are actually the same way - as they fall in the same performance range, and Windows 8 is not visibly faster than Windows 7, except for some animations that make you think it is. But when using the old x86 apps on them (just Office in Surface RT's case), they're just as slow as they've ever been on netbooks.

I agree completely. Netbooks were fine until they started putting Windows on them. They sold more for a while, until everyone thought they were shit because they were slow, meanwhile, with a light linux distro on them, they were more than capable.

The netbook didn't die, it was killed. Firstly by Intel and Microsoft licensing fees and hardware restrictions, and secondly by hardware manufacturers not actually wanting to make something quite so low-margin.

Which is another way of saying they weren't economically viable at the prices consumers were willing to pay for them.

The iPad killed Netbooks stone dead. I had a netbook, but 6 months later I got an iPad 2 and have literally don't believe I have even touched the netbook since. I currently have no idea where it is, but should probably trash it just on general data privacy principles.

They were entirely viable for upstart/rising PC manufacturers like Acer, the form-factor and "just good enough" utility was a startling break from the 15-19" laptop form factors that were the rage back in 2006/2007 when netbooks

Netbooks, if you remember, are the commercial response to OLPC, I saw one - it was a pretty sweet toy. So Intel wanted to not only kill the OLPC (and thus created Netbooks as a response), but then Microsoft saw that Linux was acutally taking hold, and decided to get in on the hit-job and whack the Netbook category before it cannibalized their bigger vendors' profits (and their own licensing profits).

And yes, the iPad (and later the 11" MB Air) put a final stake in heart of the netbook - both more stylish and usable for real non-power users for "consumption" than either a netbook or standard laptop.

Success of the Chromebook? Sure there needs to be more data than being at the top of Amazon bestsellers list?

Real hard numbers from Google would be good but I don't think they're going to release them(no Nexus sales numbers). Statscounter and Net Applications numbers would be good for a proxy count.

Just bought and did a big upgrade on a used Acer Aspire One ZG5. Great little machine.

Perfect for working on the train, where space is very cramped, and since I'm already walking 4 miles a day with one full size laptop in my backpack, the low weight is a big plus!

A few commenters are asking about running their favourite distro on these. I've installed a Debian chroot on mine. I've been using it as my main machine for almost 2 months now. I'm quite happy with it, but I mostly use it as a terminal to bigger machines at the university.

To get X I hacked together a Chrome App[0] VNC client, based on noVNC. It's a bit laggy sometimes, but does the job for my purposes.

Ron Minnich (of Coreboot fame) wrote a guide for doing the same with Arch[1]. And there's Crouton[2] for Ubuntu, but I'm not sure whether it does ARM or not.

[0] https://bitbucket.org/saljam/vnc

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IVABFl9TJMFPqoE_c0vWP7Yh...

[2] https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

Nowadays I'm very douptfull about those rankings, I've seen a seller that we set up with Amazon in the top 3 in a category despite having done no sales.

They aren't straight rankings. They have a complex algorithm that has several weightings and probably include some velocity variables that affect placement.

There's been lots of speculation but Amazon rarely gives more than hints about how they calculate their best seller lists:

"We base rankings on all-time sales, as well as recent sales that are weighted more heavily than older sales, so that our lists are timely and aren't always dominated by all-time best-sellers like Harry Potter." - Amazon Spokeswoman

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32336521/ns/business-us_business...

As much as I'm pleased* to see this, I don't think "without a major advertising campaign" is fair. There are no end of Google ads in the Underground at the moment, featuring Chromebooks front and centre, and I assume that's not the only place.

*disclaimer: I work for Google, so I may not be totally unbiased on this point.

How many people buy laptops through Amazon? I always found the selection impossible to sort through, let alone figuring out if I'm getting this year's model or last year's model.

I do. I do research elsewhere, and then go to Amazon for price shopping. Asus in particular was best on Amazon.

I'm a little surprised it's happened so early but I'd attribute it to the fact that it's actually cheaper than an iPad. I've got the Acer c710 and actually like working with it even though it seems like the processor is a little slower than my old cr-48.

The price probably played a role, but I also think they address pretty different markets. Not everyone wants to hold a tablet in their hands all day, while others would rather use a tablet than a normal laptop.

What is crazy is they have been sold out since early December (or maybe even before that).

Has Portable NaCl arrived on the ARM Chromebook yet? Google promised it by the end of the year:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57534803-93/google-offers-l...

Interesting because for me it is showing up as $324 and not the famous $250 price. I am definitely buying one of these when it comes back in stock. I think I'll replace my Asus Transformer with a Chrome book and a Nexus 7

It's because it's from another seller.

If you look on the right side, you'll see $250 from Amazon but it's out of stock.

I tried one at Best Buy earlier this month, since nobody else has one that you can actually put your hands on. They were sold out but they had a live demo model working in a display.

The keyboard just felt...odd. I don't know if it was because the keys were slightly larger and spaced farther apart than a similar low-profile Mac keyboard, or if it was the different placement of keys (no Alt key, but a large "search" key in it's place)

Anyone else have some opinions of the keyboard?

> "The keyboard just felt...odd."

My opinion is that all keyboards feel odd compared to what I use on a daily basis. If I use any keyboard for 2-3 days straight, it will stop feeling odd.

It's all a matter of what you're accustomed to using.

The Samsung ARM Chromebook I have has 2 normally located Alt keys. The Search key replaces Caps Lock (Good riddance!)

Are you sure you weren't using one of the Intel ones? Maybe it's the British/American difference...

Maybe I'm getting mixed up with the Acer C7 model, which was also on display.

Yes, I agree - I'm pretty sure the key placement/spacing isn't 100% standard.

That said, I still really love the device as a very portable, long-battery-life second computer. Recommended my girlfriend get one (she's going to be getting a desktop soon as her main comp) and she's really happy with it...

...when she gets to use it ;)

Windows laptops have many different brands and models, and even Macbooks have been around long enough that there's different types, but there's basically just 2 Chromebooks. This means they might only be a tiny fraction of PC sales, but still out come as the #1 specific product.

Anyone know where I could get one around Santa Clara? As a Canadian I don't think I can buy one in Canada. But I have to go to Santa Clara for the Open Compute summit. I checked the nearest best buys but nothing.

More interestingly to me is that Apple has all but one of the top-10 laptops that is selling for over $500.

Would love to get one of these babies and install Ubuntu.

Is it possible to install Java+Eclipse+Android SDK on it?

Check this link out: http://chromeos-cr48.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/arm-chrubuntu-12...

Even if possible, for me I think this setup would be a very painful experience with a slower CPU, low resolution display, and only 2GB RAM compared to what at least I'm used to, which is a Dell M4500 i7 with 8GB RAM, granted it did cost five times as much a couple of years back.

I'm running ubuntu on my ARM Chromebook; it runs well. (Or at lesst, better than an atom will)

If he ditched eclipse, it could actually work. Developing Android apps with Emacs and the command line tools is really quite feasible, especially since there's no enterprise shit-ola which is what people rely heavily on IDEs to generate for them.

But I don't think the Android SDK is available in anything but x86... so, maybe if he used qemu emulation?

I've always been interested in having a cheap, replaceable and portable laptop like this as a dev machine, but the more I think about it the more I realize this is more like an iPad (i.e. for media consumption) than a dev machine. That is until we have some solid browser-based "cloud" IDE's.

Chromebooks make excellent portable SSH terminals (see [0]) thanks to having decent keyboards (esp. for the price range) and great battery life. http://c9.io shows some promise as well, though IMHO it still doesn't beat good old-fashioned tmux.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...

Is there any indication that they'll ever add windowed (not full-screen) X-forwarding?

When I'm working from afar, ssh with tunneled X is all I need.

If you spend any time at all without net connectivity, you need to be able to work with native tools on a cloned code repo. The machine is more than powerful enough for plenty of local dev tasks, it's really a shame you can't work locally.

I run Ubuntu on mine.

I haven't tried running Eclipse. Oracle recently released an Early Access version of Java 8 with hardfp support to cash in on the Raspberry Pi fever, presumably that build would work on the ARM/Chromebook running Ubuntu (though it wouldn't be totally optimized for it) but I haven't tried it to be sure.

If I were doing Android development on this system I'd probably stick with ant based builds and use emacs or gedit (I wish Sublime Text 2 had an ARM build, the fact that it doesn't is kind of killing it as a useful editor for me these days). Eclipse is already a bit slower than I would like on my desktop, I'd imagine using it wouldn't be that great on the Chromebook.

OS of Best Sellers in Laptop Computers

1 Chrome

2 OSX

3 Windows 7

4 OSX

5 Windows 7

6 Windows 8

7 Windows 8

8 Windows 8

9 Windows 7

10 Windows 8

11 Chrome

And #2,4,10 are the only 3 over $500

I wish I could install arch-arm to the internal drive.

If it's like the other chromebooks, you can if you enable Dev mode.

Never underestimate the selling power of cheap crap.

This crap happens to have a 4-star rating from the people who used/owns it.

It's far from crap, it's my standard day to day laptop now, has been since November.

I still have my lenovo laptop for when I need it, but that's pretty rare

It's now my primary laptop as well.

I've gotten 95% of my development tools working properly on it. Granted, most of those tools are command-line based (i.e. vim, git, python, etc.), so it's not really a surprise. The only barriers keeping this from becoming my only computer are things that I never expected it to conquer in the first place. I didn't get it with the expectation it could run IntelliJ/Arduino, so no hard feelings there.

I now reach for the Chromebook far more often than I do my (older generation) Macbook Air.

What is it about the Chromebook that you prefer over the Air?

Price.

It's 4x cheaper ($250 vs. $1000), for one. If you realize you are spending 90% of your time doing work (or not) in the Chrome browser, why not just get a Chromebook then? A lot of people are arguing that Chromebooks are better for school kids, too, than more expensive desktops, laptops, or even ipads.

I have a mac laptop at work, which I only keep around for video editing, but you can even do basic video editing in the browser nowadays, with sites such as WeVideo and Pixorial.

Price is a non-issue since I've already bought both, though it is certainly keeping me from upgrading to a newer Macbook Air. Why spend so much to upgrade to a laptop that I'll barely use?

With the Chromebook, I get longer battery life, a lighter frame, a faster startup time, no fans/heating issues, and more consistent keyboard shortcuts (there's only one set to remember because there's only one app). Some of these might not be issues with the MBA line anymore, but mine is a first-gen machine.

Aside from the things I mentioned in my original comment, my Macbook Air is really just a keyboard, web browser, and terminal to me. Well, the Chromebook is too, and it's a better one at that.

Do you do anything besides typical "web-stuff" on it? Granted, I spend quite a bit of time in my browser, but then I have that pesky development-thing I do. I like my iPad, but it hasn't replaced my laptop.

I do a lot of ssh stuff from it, there's a pretty decent ssh client available and that helps a lot.

When I first got it, the default ssh client was javascript based, but you could get the native code version by joining a specific Google group and then installing a development version of the same ssh client, not sure if thats changed yet

If you find ChromeOS limiting, you can always install a full Linux distro on the machine.

My Samsung ARM Chromebook has two partitions, one of which loads into ChromeOS and one which loads into a full Ubuntu/ARM rootfs.

How do you find Ubuntu on it? I bought by arm chromebook totally expecting to put ubuntu on it, but I've just never got round to it

I believe such comments were once called "FUD". Are folks still being paid by M$ and others to randomly reply in various forums and discussions?

What do you base your "cheap crap" comment on? Using the laptop and not liking it? What did you not like about it?

What don't I like?

For starters, the exterior is basically a knock-off of the Macbook Air. This type of crummy me-too design is consistent with other products considered cheap crap.

Next, in terms of functionality, I am to understand that the Chromebook does not offer much more than a web browser. To some people this is just how our cloud-filled future will be. To me, it just does less. That's not a feature. It's just crappy.

Third, I am to understand that it is loaded with, and possibly tied to Google services. I like Google search fine and well, but I'm very sick of Google trying to turn the entire population into "data prostitutes" who trade privacy for convenience. No, I don't want to upload all my documents into Google. No, I don't want all my communication stored by Google. No, I don't want my location and all my movements tracked by Google. No, I don't want all my web browsing activity to be tracked by Google. The whole prospect seems orwellian.

I'm guessing someone will tell me that my concerns will be resolved if I load Linux on it. Well, I used Linux on the desktop for years, and I got tired of having to cruise forums and bug reports to work around whatever the latest issue with it was. I finally bought a Macbook and you know what? It just works. It has all the cool unix stuff I need on the command line, plus a pretty solid package manager in the form of Homebrew. Not to mention the hardware is first-class. I'm sorry if it sounds like FUD to you that I don't want to jump back into a tar pit of f'ing around with Linux on the desktop. My time is worth more than that.

Note: I still use Linux on the server and it's pretty great. It's the desktop that I consider a waste of time.

So in summary, it just looks like a crappy knock-off that sacrifices user privacy and does not do very much. And the price is cheap, that's a fact.

Awesome, so you didn't even try using such a device - all your criticism is based on hearsay and reviews. I do appreciate a more elaborated reply though - I think you should've written all that from the beginning.

A few thoughts:

Is it sustainable as a business? Anyone know if Google is subsidizing these or if there is a profit margin, however small? I think it's all about attracting people to Google Apps for Business but if a lot of folks just load Ubuntu on it, Google might have second thoughts on it. I think it is meant as mostly a bundle with Google Apps for Enterprise to attract companies with cheap and/or rented hardware.

Also, being on the Amazon bestseller list is not a very good indicator of popularity. Since Google is very unlikely to release the real numbers we will have to rely on things like StatCounter, Net Applications or even popular web sites run by HN'ers to get more data on sales.

Will RMS consider this more or less free than Windows/Apple machines? On one hand you have multiple OEMs, dev mode to boot alternative OSes, compability with Web etc. but on the other hand you need a Google account to even use it, and it's tied heavily to Google cloud services, no native API, no chance of Firefox for it etc. i.e It can be seen as taking consumers even more away from independent offline usage to being at the mercy of the cloud providers. What happens if your Google account gets locked?

The majority of people will use the default OS.

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