Google Chromebook Under $300 Defies PC Market With Growth
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Chrome and Win8RT are the only OSes that are good for an ARM-based notebook form-factor, and the ARM chip is necessary to make this device not suck at this end of the cost spectrum.
That and frankly, I think we're all sick of supporting Grandma's windows machine, so getting computer-illiterate people onto a "web-only" device is great.
I won't buy one, I don't need one, but I can see the niches it fills.
I recently replaced my wife's aging MacBook Air with the Samsung/ARM Chromebook - she much prefers it. It doesn't overheat, nor require frequent restarts. But she has a Masters in CS, and works from the command line, so let's add to, "computer-illiterate people" , "..and people who dont want to spend time nursing their computer".
I've got my setup scripted here:
I know Unity hasn't, and Gnome 3 (my favorite) has pixel-doubling support on the way, but if there are any others or if you've been able to optimize an X WM to be readable and polished.
https://github.com/appsforartists/pixel_webdev
All I use it for is Sublime Text, so things more-or-less look great for me. The problem with Linux is that there are multiple ways of doing any one thing. So, just because Openbox and Sublime can handle high DPI doesn't mean your run-of-the-mill KDE/GTK app will.
Fully-featured web IDE; supports Ruby, Python, Go, and more. You provision a box to do your development on.
Your wife is right, there is no such thing as a sub $250 pc that would usurp her MBP
A Chromebook is really the only true netbook that's ever existed.
I didn't have a problem with my Acer netbook. It's slow, but not horribly slow. The main laggard factor is the 1gb RAM, which is too little for a Windows 7 install.
However, I had to remove all the crapware first. If they didn't ship with those installed, they wouldn't make money from all those juicy contracts.
Someone further down mentioned a beer-induced $800 repair on a MBA. I dropped half of mine in a sink of water (don't ask) and it works perfectly. Tested the 'splash proof' keyboard quite thoroughly.
Definitely a market for lower-end sub-$500 machines that are actually capable of running anything.
In the sense of a true netbook-as-a-thin-client, the Chromebook is the only competitor in this market. What you have with 6GB of RAM and a large hard drive is a small form factor laptop. I agree that there's a market for lower-end cheap laptops. I disagree with calling them netbooks, because then you get confused posts with people asking what the point of a netbook is. The Chromebook is the point of a netbook.
Some Sun partners tried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray
and
Cue a few years of Moore's Law, and the net effect of a market for affordable yet usable portable machines produces capable, upgradeable machines. And tablets. Cue content producer/consumer distinction etc.
1. People were expecting a laptop; they are not; however, they're decent computers (don't do video, don't run VMs ... :), and portability and price are really nice.
2. Laptops got cheaper, and netbooks didn't ; when the first netbooks came out, they were less than half the price of the cheapest laptops; now, they're about the same price :(
http://www.neowin.net/news/report-claims-just-500000-chromeb...
I also wonder if Chromebooks are priced to make even an operating profit.
As a programmer, I honestly only use 2 windows: browser and shell. Running crouton to create chroot Ubuntu "images" I can have my normal full (text-based) dev environment, and alt-tab back and forth with the browser. Honestly it feels easier to use than Ubuntu - I don't use any of the builtin Google services (e.g. Drive), but they manage to stay out of the way.
It's pretty cheap, looks pretty reasonable, and comes in at a pretty low weight. The screen's not the greatest, but I'm not doing anything where that matters. So all in all a great dev machine.
Only caveat for me is that Dropbox doesn't have an installable app for ARM. I need to find something else that does a good job of seamlessly syncing my workspaces and NFS, rsync, etc don't fit as nicely as Dropbox.
I just can't see it possible to run anything that relies on the weight of the JVM or relies on external apps (Redis, etc). What web app can live without some sort of a data store (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc)? Let's not even get into if you need to compile anything. (Even if you're not working in C, compilation is sometimes necessary with gems/npm/etc)
The default answer seems to be just ssh into a dev machine, using the Chromebook as a dumb terminal. While it works, that destroys a classic workflow used by many, relies on Internet access, and adds additional cost (especially if you're a consultant). Even a cheap VPS adds at least $300 a year in cost.
Am I incorrect about running a full dev environment on the Chromebook? I'd love to hear others' experiences.
I know the JVM isn't often associated with low memory applications, but it seems like it should be possible. As I mentioned in my other reply, the Chromebook has more resources than the average Android phone, so all those Java Android apps should run fine (albeit under Dalvik rather than Sun's JVM).
a. Those that run fine on the Chromebook.
b. Those that would run fine on a larger laptop or desktop, but not on the Chromebook.
c. Those that need to be deployed to some sort of server.
I don't write anything that falls under (b). If a program is expecting to be run on 10 disks, or with 48gb of RAM, or across a cluster of 12 nodes, it's highly unlikely that my personal dev machine will work out, so (c) will be used. That's also how I'd want to test any production-level deployment.
The gap between (a) and (b) is actually quite small. The Samsung 3 Chromebook specs are a bit better than almost every smartphone, so pretty much any Android app could be placed under (a). Pretty much any unit test for a (c) app fits under (a).
Compiles would be faster with a beefier dev machine, but the fact that the Chromebook comes with an SSD already places it ahead of the default corporate machine (at least in my experience - perhaps employees get SSDs in their Dells nowadays). Certainly a MB Air has a faster CPU, but the difference isn't that dramatic for development purposes.
As one counterexample, I'll point out that my wife spends most of her work day in Photoshop and Illustrator. Even if those apps ran on Linux, my guess is that the resource needs would still make an Air or a MB Pro a much better choice.
The SSD in the Chomebook for instance gets about 64 MB/s sequential read, 17 MB/s sequential write, 4 MB/s random 4k read and 1 MB/s random 4k write.
Which in practice is probably better than a 5400 RPM HD, but there's still a magnitude of difference from a most laptop SSDs.
For instance, I recently bought a Lenovo x230. I have Arch Linux on it, along with Firefox and Ratpoison. I get pretty much the same thing as I had ChromeOS: a full-screen web browser in one window and a full-screen terminal in another. This configuration has none of the privacy concerns I have about using a Google product and I don't need Google's permission just to create a user account.
(Backups are a breeze too: just a few dot files. I use Firefox Sync to back up my bookmarks.)
I personally love the design of the x230, and am looking to get one myself. The biggest sticking problem for me is price.
If there is innovations to be had with laptops, it is resistance to common desk issues like spilt drinks. The device being cheap is parallel with these needs. Making something thinner and more proprietary and glued together is the wrong direction for me.
Here's a video of a Thinkpad drinking a full glass of water while playing a video: http://youtu.be/1SWi6LlFGjk
Here's a video of a Thinkpad taking lightning bolts from a pair of Van de Graff generators for a whole minute without any problems: http://youtu.be/JXsDfuVctFk
Resistance to common household wear and tear such as spilled drinks or being struck by lightning is certainly a rare quality in a machine, but it's not unheard of.
I'm a fan of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0ujtrHvOTk
Two guys (doing a promo spot for Lenovo) jumping on a trampoline with thinkpads and water balloons, then pouring water into one, all in glorious slow motion.
Also, we've just bought an Acer V5, 12.1" with touch screen, 4GB Ram, and an A6 processor; really nice, for $429 ; it's a sub $500 laptop that doesn't suck; basically, a slightly nicer netbook :)
Chromebooks are nice, especially for simple stuff, but there are nice cheap laptops too :)
With Haswell, the Asus could really hit it big. Ubuntu, I strongly think, has its future as the sort of super-Chromebook. More advanced, but still manageable.
I've actually been hoping that Haswell would revitalize the market for machines like this like you mention, but all it seems to have done (so far) is make every machine like this get a touchscreen thrown on it and marked up another $150.
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Comput...
But I don't agree with the last paragraph that Chromebooks are ready to go to higher-end. At least for the next few years, Chromebooks should stay sub-$500, with most of them being ARM-based and sub-$300, but with a bigger battery (even more important than upgrading the resolution, I'd say).
They last about 6-7 hours, but they have an embarrassingly small battery (about as big as the ones in 7" tablets). Double the battery size, keep the ARM processor up to date and the price under $300, and that should be the strategy going forward for the next few years for Chromebooks.
I think the lower priced chromebooks are a great deal, and they should stay focused on that part of the market. I genuinely never would have purchased a netbook until I saw that the chromebook had the hardware it does at the low price point it has.
So for the Nth time, the ARM ChromeBook has a 30Wh battery. The Nexus 7 has a 16Wh battery. This is not "about the same", it's a factor of 2 difference.
What would be about the same is the 2012 MacBook Air (35Wh) -- a device that incidentally has almost the same form factor as the ChromeBook.
Now, Apple did manage to inch it up to 38 Wh in the latest release. Maybe Samsung will be able to do get similar relative improvements. But if you're genuinely suggesting that a low-end machine 11" super-thin laptop could have a 60Wh battery... Well, I just don't know what to say.
And all that for half the price of an iPad.
This is the laptop parents can give kids and folks can give their elderly parents without worrying about spending too much time fixing it and removing viruses.
"Hey, my phone's out of battery. Can I check my texts on yours real quick?"
B) there's no fine-grained tracking built right in. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You have the source code to Chromium available to you, please provide evidence. If you believe the visible source code was augmented to add tracking, prior to being installed on the device, then it should be relatively easy to show a Wireshark log demonstrating the fine-grained tracking you speak of.
I thought the whole idea of chromebook was that you used google services rather than locally installed apps. So yes, inherently more tracking since they want to monetise ads.
It doesn't defeat the point for the buyer, since its often the most cost-effective way to get basic hardware for a linux laptop.
It doesn't defeat the point for the hardware vendor.
Heck, it doesn't really even defeat the point for Google. Sure, it may not be as good for them as you using ChromeOS, but its better for them than you either using Windows or MacOS (or paying for Windows or MacOS to get a Linux box.)
The Chromebook is literally no different, in this respect.
So your argument about "inherently more tracking" is fatally flawed.
If I'm watching a movie on my linux laptop and the battery dies I want to continue watching from the same spot on my wife's ipad.
I think Plex media server might do some of that for normal video formats, though I can't see Google and the MPAA being excited about building software to make playing ripped DVDs easier..
The question then is the following: are chromebooks appropriate for content creation? I suspect the answer will be yes someday soon. However, the elderly and children market will not be the right audience for such devices.
Unless they're really twisting definitions and calling a $186 ipod touch a "laptop under $300 that isn't a chromebook"
I might have missed it in the article.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Acer-AOD270-1375-Netbook-Processor-Esp...
There is a marketing problem in that I have a nexus 7 tablet and a bluetooth keyboard. What's the marketing message differentiating my nexus 7 from a chromebook, other than the screen is a wee bit bigger on the chromebook and the apps on the nexus 7 almost perfectly match the apps on my phone? There doesn't appear to be a marketing message differentiating them.
I think it's a great device, and I'll likely buy 1 or 2 or a few. However, I don't think that the marketing communicates what it really is, and folks are getting burned as a result.
I wonder, when sales performance is reported, is this gross sales, or net after returns?
I've found that it has displaced the tablet for most casual browsing. I think the main reasons is that while it's slow, it's still faster than a tablet. Having a real keyboard is very nice. It also works well as an SSH terminal.
Basically we're looking at the bifurcation of the market. People who can afford it have Apple devices and everyone else will end up with Google products subsidized by advertising dollars.
Laptops and desktops are not selling well because, at the same time there have been no huge leaps in actually useful technology, manufacturers are trying to upsell us toward fancier machines that don't actually help us do anything.
At this point, a regular laptop should cost as much as a cell phone and be about as efficient. Instead, we're getting $1400 "ultra-books" that aren't so ultra that anyone actually needs one.
> share in the first quarter
That is really quite stunning in the context of the whole laptop market. I am kind of intrigued at how Google is pulling this off. There are so many good arguments against a Chromebook for most people. You can buy an ordinary laptop for similar price and just run Chrome and get the same thing but with more features. Even without that, this seems to violate the law that a new entrant into a market has to be not just better but compellingly better to get market share.
How is Google doing it? Are they going direct to pitch these to bulk buyers like academic, students, businesses, governments? Or are "normal" consumers actually wandering into Best Buy and choosing it over the Windows laptop right next to it?
A bit of both approaches, to be honest. People used to argue that OS X is the far better OS because of its dead simplicity, but that's falling flat on its face now that Chromebooks have arrived. No malware PERIOD -- no code can execute without some sort of complicated exploit, and if that wasn't enough, Linux runs at its base, which adds an extra layer of security.
The beauty of the Chromebook is its simplicity, and extensibility. It's practically a $249 Linux box for the power users -- load up crouton and off you go. For the consumers who never need to touch the Linux layer, they can use the top layer without ever seeing Linux, and enjoy computing nirvana.
Once NaCl is mature enough that most developers use it and once the Web Store populates with offline apps, watch this start to take off. It will ride on the same merits that drove OS X for over a decade, but it will fly higher.
Just you wait. This is the final redemption for desktop Linux.
It's $250 so there's no argument about buying X or Y netbook instead, you can barely get anything with a keyboard that browses the internet for that price. Also for that price you get 2 (3?) years of 100GB on Google Drive and 12 Gogo WiFi passes, which together are already worth over $250. So you can throw the device in the trash and still come out on top.
Now to the computer itself:
First, the battery life is awesome, 6.5 hours of solid use (WiFi model) and since it turns on from cold in ~7 seconds you can turn it off between sessions and not lose any power at all. If that's too long for you just close the lid, you'll lose about 1% per hour but everything resumes instantly when you open it (and I do mean INSTANTLY).
Second, the hardware is really excellent for the price. The keyboard is my favorite laptop keyboard out there (even against my MBP) and the trackpad is second only to Apple devices imo. It's the same weight/size as a MacBook Air but maybe 0.2" thicker. The only hardware downsides are the plastic chassis and the screen's somewhat bad viewing angles.
Third, it runs most of what you need right out of the box. I don't even have my in developer mode, you don't need that to use Google's Secure Shell and Remote Desktop Chrome extensions. It has an Offline version of Google Drive so you can keep your most important documents local and everything syncs when you're connected.
Fourth, it's stress-free. Because everything is synchronized to the cloud and the hardware is so cheap, you never have to worry about this thing. If it breaks (which it won't easily), just go to your nearest Best Buy, drop $250, and sign in with you Google account and you'll be back exactly where you left off (even down to the tabs you had open). I really can't recommend this device more highly. It's definitely not the right device for full-time development but as a companion to a larger laptop or a desktop it's a perfect second machine and much more useful than an iPad or Transformer-style tablet (I've had both).
Anyone have any ideas on this?
FWIW, I'm familiar with BSD bootloaders. I can follow the Linux boot process, but haven't invested much time in mastering it.
I borrow it for business trips and works well enough. Best laptop I ever bought.
It concerns me for reference.
The device is dangerous to say the least.
I wish Stallman would write about them as people might start paying attention to those of us who can see what is coming.
That happens post-sale which means the sales figures are good.
They are lured in by the price and get screwed. That's all this shows.
Crap netbooks, no-brand PC accessories and appliances, landfill Androids and supermarket bubble-packed electronics fill the same market sector.
Edit: I stand by my comment :)
>I asked a couple different Best Buy reps if the Chromebooks had a big return rate. "All the time," both said frankly. "They return it in a couple of days. They don't know how it works."
During my Google Glass intro, I had the chance to use a Pixel during the meeting. My wife was more attracted to the Pixel than the Glass. They probably could have sold her one that day if they had pushed it on her.
A year or two ago, I set up a retired family friend with an old desktop machine running Ubuntu and Chrome.
He loved using it. Who wouldn't love the web if they'd never had it before? All he ever did was launch Chrome and browse websites. Sometimes he'd watch catch-up TV, but that was also through Chrome.
A while back, a failed Ubuntu upgrade left the machine unbootable, and I had to reinstall Ubuntu for him. More recently, the HD crashed.
So for his birthday we bought him a £200 Chromebook. It has exactly the same relevant capabilities as the old Ubuntu desktop, but it's small, light, low-power, and unlikely to get viruses or ask incomprehensible questions about software updates.
Yes, an iPad might have worked too, but it would have been a lot more expensive, less familiar, and lacking in Flash (which, if all you ever do is browse websites, can still be somewhat limiting).
For me, the biggest problem with laptops is keeping them sync'd with my desktop. I could use a laptop as a primary computer, and with better expansion options than previously exited (USB3, dual Display Ports, etc.), but I still find laptops limiting, meaning I only use them when I can't have my desktop. My desktop has 6 cores, 4 drives, a high-quality sound card, a real serial port, etc. These things are all important for what I use a computer for, most of the time, and a laptop just isn't good enough to be my only machine.
Chrome OS solves the synchronization problem for me. The configurability is restricted more than my average Linux box, so there is less to concern myself about setting up. My browser settings and extension sync, the desktop background syncs, etc. I can take a brand new Chromebook and be up in running in 5 minutes.
That's the value proposition of Chrome OS for me. Once it is up and running, I can ssh to a real computer and browse the web, which is what I'd do with a ultra-excellent billion-core superlaptop 99% of the time anyway.
The other 1% of the time, I'd like to use a laptop for portable software-defined radio applications, and as it stands, Chrome OS is terrible for that. But since Chrome has APIs for talking to USB, serial ports, and audio, I'm actually working on supporting controlling my radio and analyzing the I/Q inputs as a Chrome packaged app. The advantage for me is that I'll have SDR functionality on any computer I encounter: you can install packaged apps from the webstore on Chrome OS, Mac, Windows, and Linux, and everything will Just Work.
Finally, the Pixel has the best screen I've ever seen on a computer.
Anyway, Chrome OS is nowhere near its full potential just with the APIs available today. I think as more developers write awesome web apps or Chrome apps, more people will use Chrome OS, further incentivizing developers to create even better non-desktop apps. But as it stands, I am 100% satisfied with the Pixel as my primary laptop, and I imagine many other people are too.