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$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
- 013a 8y agoIn classic tech journalism fashion, no mention or even apparent knowledge of Microsoft's own efforts in this area: Polaris, Core OS, OneCore, and CShell [1] [2] [1] https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os-and-polaris https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os... [2] https://youtu.be/F_bPcctTV_Y https://youtu.be/F_bPcctTV_Y
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- make3 8y agoall things so small no one has ever heard of them though
- 013a 8y agoWindows Core OS is literally the next major OS from Windows (though who knows if they'll just silently upgrade Win10 without a name change or what). Its not small. The point is to create a modularized operating system, built on OneCore, where they can add or remove major features depending on the platform it is deployed to (even features as big as Win32 support). Andromeda is the codename for their revitalized smartphone effort. Polaris is the codename for their "windows minus the legacy" experience on desktop; no Win32, just UWP, capable of running on significantly less powerful hardware.
- make3 8y agoI agree with you, but it's not because it's big that anyone has ever heard of it (consumers, not Microsoft employees)
- anoncoward111 8y ago$100 Pre-2010 laptops running Lubuntu are an even more dangerous threat that more and more people are learning about
- yunyu 8y agoI don't think that the typical cheap laptop purchaser willing to spend the time and effort into installing and learning to use a different operating system.
- z_open 8y agoYou mean like chrome os?
- abraham 8y agoChrome OS is basically just a browser so anyone who has been on the internet is pretty comfortable on it.
- anoncoward111 8y agoLubuntu is just as user friendly and comes pre-installed with all of the things one would expect, like a browser and media player and word processing software. There's an app store and browser add ons work well. The hardest thing for a casual user to learn would be "sudo apt-get install" and then guessing what the package name is that they might want to download, like vlcplayer or java
- matt2000 8y ago"The hardest thing for a casual user to learn would be "sudo apt-get install" and then guessing what the package name is that they might want to download, like vlcplayer or java" Everything you said in this sentence is a deal breaker for a casual user, and a terrible user experience in general.
- beerlord 8y agoChromebooks have one fatal flaw: Microsoft Office on them sucks. You're stuck with side-loading in the Android edition, which is an app with a simplified UI and requiring always-online connection. All of this might be OK for a schoolkid, but for anyone else you might as well stick with a Windows laptop for real work, or an iPad for real consumption.
- jenscow 8y agoThat's a flaw of Office, not Chromebooks.
- thinkmassive 8y agoPlenty of people get by without native Office apps. The majority of Linux users for one. And aren’t some of the Mac Office apps basically crippled compared to the Windows versions?
- daveFNbuck 8y agoI haven't used Office since I was a schoolkid, and I do real work. Not everyone has the same needs as you.
- Nasrudith 8y agoI don't get the insistence upon Microsoft word as a killer app personally. It seems to be the suit and tie of software - more expensive than the alternatives and cumbersome but hidebound ones insist it is a prerequisite to be taken seriously.
- antoineMoPa 8y agoI can't believe entire businesses I worked for rely on Microsoft Word for documentation. Heavy, slow, expensive, closed source, not searchable, with ugly output.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWell kids [think they] need it often because schools demand it as the only option for homework submissions -- specifically Word document format. Teachers will provide files in .doc[x] format too. LibreOffice copes mainly but schools don't seem to know that; and teachers of course get deals to lock them in to MS.
- mabbo 8y agoI was an intern at Microsoft the day that ChromeOS was announced. Conveniently, a few days later the head of Windows was giving a talk to all the interns. Overall, spoke well, but during Q&A someone asked him what he thought about ChromeOS. He laughed. He said it was a joke. He made it very clear that he didn't understand what Google was even thinking. And that stuck such a sour chord on me. Here's a company well known to be hiring the brightest people in the world, and they've announced a direct competitor to what you're doing... and you're laughing? It was like seeing an experienced chess player playing against a rumored-to-be-brilliant child prodigy and laughing at the stupid move the child was making. I spent the next summer working on the ChromeOS team.
- ChrisSD 8y agoIt's not like they haven't got a history of doing this. Remember when the iPhone had "no chance" of "any significant market share"?[0] [0] https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2007-04-29-ballmer-ceo-forum-usat_N.htm https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2...
- ianai 8y agoThey also spread plenty of FUD around all things Linux too.
- jacquesm 8y agoIt went quite a bit further than just FUD.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoAnd when the Web was irrelevant. Bill Gates and patent troll Nathan Myrvhold wrote a while book unironically displaying their utter lack of vision about the industry. Their while business is a mix of making bland weak copies of more popular software to run on their decades old Windows entrenchment, Xbox, and a few nice keyboard and mice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_b...
- open-source-ux 8y agoDon't forget that ChromeOS is an operating system (OS) that tracks everything you do. To use the OS to the full requires a Google account, so you aren't even anonymous while you use it. (As a reminder, your Google account = your name, your date of birth, your location, your gender and mobile phone number i.e. some of your most private and personal details.) We've seen Microsoft criticised, quite rightly, for introducing tracking of users in Windows 10 (euphemistically labelled as telemetry), yet Google gets no criticism. In fact we get the opposite, people rush to Google's defence. The double-standard is hard to understand. Presumably, if you think it's fine for ChromeOS to record everything you do in the OS, you equally think it's fine for Windows/Mac OS/Ubuntu to record everything you do too (non-anonymously of course).
- gregmac 8y agoI'm not at all defending the practice, but I think it has to do with the legacy. Google is (somewhat) up front about tracking, and has always required an account. There was never a Chrome OS that didn't track you. Windows didn't used to do this, so it feels like they're changing the rules after you've agreed and bought into the platform. If Microsoft had instead called "Windows 10" something completely different, and similarly was up front about what it was doing, I suspect there wouldn't be the same backlash. Some people would still disagree with it, and would be unhappy they were moving to replace Windows with this other thing, but it wouldn't have the same impact that acting like it's just another major version upgrade does.
- toyg 8y agoNo, it's just that the volumes are still not comparable. Everyone at some point has had a Windows machine, including the privacy-conscious and the paranoid -- simply because, at the time, there was no realistic alternative. Once you reach 90% penetration, any special-interest group with a pet complaint will be sizeable. That's not happened with Chromebooks and it's unlikely to ever happen. Privacy-conscious users now have NSA-hardened Linux and "won't-let-FBI-in" iPhones, they will never have to deal with Google if they don't want to. They are not forced to use any of their services, since there are alternatives for pretty much everything -- even superior ones, in most cases. The only service that used to be unmatched was Search, and sure enough, plenty of people still complain about tracking searches.
- matt2000 8y agoI never really understood why MSFT didn't start a clean slate rewrite of Windows about a decade ago. Imagine how much simpler and more reliable it could be, and you could run Windows 7 in an emulation layer if you had older apps you depended on. Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of reliability but still include features for advanced users like developers and business analytics. Definitely feels like a missed opportunity, especially with growing discontent among developers with the Mac hardware line.
- mavhc 8y agoThey did, Windows RT
- Hydraulix989 8y agoI thought RT was just an ARM port, not a rewrite?
- gruez 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime
- Hydraulix989 8y agoClose, but not quite. The first sentence on the linked article says: "'WinRT' redirects here. It is not to be confused with Windows RT." So "Windows RT" is an ARM port of the Windows 8 OS, while "Windows Runtime" aka "WinRT" is an API for "modern" Windows applications. To be clear, I was responding to OP's literal "Windows RT" mention in my parent post.
- mavhc 8y agoWell, it's both I guess, it's designed to only run WinRT Store apps, not Win32 (Although Win32 is somewhat ported as Office runs on it), but that's the general idea, to break with the past. But the only reason people use Windows is The Past
- scarface74 8y agoDependence on Windows is the most dangerous development for Microsoft. An 8GB RAM Windows Surface Go is less performant than an iPad with 2GB of RAM for consumers. For the server, I recently had to write a process that takes messages from a queue in AWS and store it to a database. It ran well as a .Net Core based lambda running on a 256MB RAM Linux VM. I did the same with a .Net Framesork app that inherited and the smallest EC2 instance we could use was one with 4GB RAM. It was barely usable. We had to upgrade to 8GB. Microsoft has been successful because of Moore’s law hid the increasing bloat of Windows. But once smartphones and low resource required operating systems became popular, they can’t compete.
- ericcholis 8y agoI think this is entirely due to backwards compatibility.
- Arnt 8y agoAre you suggesting that Windows requires about 3700 additional MB of RAM to be backwards compatible with Windows versions that ran on devices with 32MB RAM?
- uygihvh 8y agoExcept wine can now run more windows program then any version bof windows. Wine better at windows than windows itself.
- reaperducer 8y ago
- sarcasmic 8y agoAny Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromebooks allow one to forego performance for the increased disposability of the machine. I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models. And build quality and the nature of hardware compromises at that price point have always been unpleasant, save for a few concentrated efforts like Lenovo's IdeaPad line. In other words, $600 laptops are second only to $200 laptops in making Windows look bad, making them an easy target for an OS that proved that $200 laptops can actually be quite good. Still, there are few challenges. Chromebooks' filesystem paradigm deemphasises local storage to the point of cumbersome, relying on Google Drive or custom interfaces and implementations built for each app that know how to pull up past work. This is a smart idea when everything works, but makes import, export, and context switching harder, and makes sharing a feature of the product rather than a file-based affair. On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension) are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser. Nonetheless, with Service Workers and graphics APIs and auto-resuming applications and unintrusive updates, and people using Google products anyway, Microsoft should be worried, because they're being challenged for customers in a segment where their OS is least compelling, and was largely used by default.
- nextos 8y ago
- Someone1234 8y agoLet me just say right off the bat that I like Chromebooks and think they're fantastic for education in particular (combined with GSuite). But that being said, Chromebooks don't scale with better hardware very well. You can spend $250-350 and get 90% of the experience, and a very good experience at that. If you spend three times more you'll get more memory for Chrome and slightly more responsive tabs but hardly blows your socks off. Microsoft likely aren't shaking in their boots because of a $600-900 Chromebook. If anything Android emulation is the real "killer app" since it massively expands a Chromebook's capabilities, including running Microsoft's own Android-Office apps.
- jasonvorhe 8y agoIsn't that basically the same on a Windows Laptop or an iPad? Are there any premium features that are hardware bound on any platform?
- gd2 8y agoShould I pay 3X's as much to get only 10% more experience, is a great question. But if I frame the choice as, I could pay less than $0.50 / hour for better experience on something important to me, my calculus is different.
- csomar 8y agoNo they are not. We are still not there yet. First, $600 is pretty expensive. Most Windows laptops that I see run on less than $500. Second, they don't have the ecosystem yet. Here are things you do on Windows: 1. Browse the Internet using Chrome. 2. Play a relatively demanding Video Game. 3. Run Office, Word and Excel. 4. Install your Canon Printer and print a few papers. 5. Plugin your Nikon Camera. 6. Run Adobe Photoshop to do some tweaking. Most people do that on their laptops. We are still far from being 100% cloud. Also ChromeOS is not an improvement over Windows. It is a change of environments. OSX is an improvement. The only deal is that it is prohibitively expensive.
- Ataraxy 8y agoI would argue that "most people" only do #1 from that list.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoMost people I know don’t have Photoshop, exclusively use their iPhones to shoot and edit photos, and only use Word and Excel for work (for which they already have a work machine). Only one that might be relevant is gaming but even then most people who are serious about it buy a gaming machine or game console. I got my parents - technically capable folks a Chromebook and it works beautifully.
- muro 8y agoYou can't do 2 on a cheap windows laptop. 1, 3, 4 (except no installing), 5 (with a good connection) you can do on a Chromebook too. 6 only few people do.
- partycoder 8y agoPlease tell me which of this things you cannot do on Linux right now. With Gimp you can do a lot of what you can do with Photoshop. TeX and any math package like R beat Microsoft Office and produce better documents. WordPerfect was a much better alternative to Microsoft Word, but guess what happened: Microsoft invested on Corel and suddenly they stopped releasing on Linux. There's a lot of money invested in making Office a monopoly. By supporting Office and spreading its use you are extending that monopoly further into another generation.
- nickjj 8y agoA few years ago I picked up a $300 Chromebook, spent $50 to upgrade the SSD size (swapped the SSD card in it) and now I run GalliumOS on it (native xubuntu but optimized for Chromebooks). So for $350 you get a 1080p IPS panel laptop that weighs under 3 pounds and has an SD card, headphone jack and other goodies. It easily runs a bunch of Dockerized web apps without being slow. One of the best portable computing devices I ever spent $ on. I still use it almost every day 2.5 years later. Details can be found at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...
- paulcarroty 8y agoSo for $350 you can buy much better laptop on ebay. Example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-PROBOOK-650-G2-I7-6600U-8GB-256GB-NO-OS/273407193643?epid=6019183665&hash=item3fa856b22b%3Ag%3Aaz0AAOSwxrNbcv6l&LH_BIN=1 https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-PROBOOK-650-G2-I7-6600U-8GB-256G...
- benplumley 8y agoThis is a listing for a second-hand laptop, if the Chromebook had been bought second-hand too it would have probably cost significantly less than this.
- paulcarroty 8y agoThis "second-hand laptop" is much more powerful than chromebook and can be found for less money. I just use the same price range.
- Theodores 8y agoBut you don't get the minimalist Chromebook keyboard. Plus laptop CPU thermal management has a lot of problems. I would prefer a modern and fanless Chromebook to an old laptop where the fans are whirring away the whole time for no evidence of performance gain. I am hoping that there will soon be an eight generation Pentium inside a high end Chromebook with that Chromebook running linux things like a web server natively. No idea how the IDE is going to work running that way but that is where I would like my dev environment to be going. You can still get refurbished Chromebooks, I bought a Dell one and I think that come the apocalypse there will be cockroaches and my Dell Chromebook running, if nothing else, as it is that indestructible. Plus charging seems optional. It goes for days.
- paulcarroty 8y ago$600 chromebooks? REALLY? It's better invest that money in new/used laptop. They was competitive only with $200-300 prices.
- londons_explore 8y agoThey'll still have the $200 ones... Paying $600 is for people who want to have multiple tabs open at once.
- disconnected 8y agoThis article misses the mark completely by assuming that Microsoft still needs Windows to stay afloat. This hasn't been true for years. They have realized that it doesn't matter whether you use Windows, Chrome OS, Android or Linux, or anything else: everything is in the cloud now, so the OS is pretty much irrelevant. Azure, Office 365 and heck, even Linkedin are doing great: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/microsoft_huge_2018_q4/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/microsoft_huge_2018... So I very much doubt that Microsoft is sweating it about Chromebooks.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoI think that's quite a bit premature. Yes, Microsoft has done a great job diversifying of late, but Windows is still a huge percentage of their revenue. Also, my guess is that people that use Windows are much more likely to use Office (even the cloud version), which is the next biggest part of their revenue.
- scarface74 8y agoGoogle hasn’t made any real profit on anything besides advertising during its whole existence. It’s much less diversified than Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoI disagree with that. First, Google's other businesses are growing very fast, much faster than its overall ad business: https://qz.com/1334369/alphabet-q2-2018-earnings-google-is-more-than-just-advertising-now/ https://qz.com/1334369/alphabet-q2-2018-earnings-google-is-m... . Second, and I think perhaps more fundamentally, Google is incredibly well diversified among ad channels, so I think lumping that all together and then drawing the conclusion "Google is at risk because they get all their money from ads" misses the mark. Google has AdWords, AdSense, DoubleClick, YouTube, Android, GMail, Google Assistant/Nest, etc. They may be dependent on ads but they control a staggering breadth of ad channels.
- partycoder 8y agoThere is no excuse to use Windows anymore. Windows' duck taped UI makes absolutely no sense. On top of that, you get ads, nagware and your activity data is exfiltrated to their servers... and this is on a product that you have to pay for. I don't mind paying for a product, but Windows does not offer any added value.
- soniman 8y agoOne thing that's good about Chromebook is that if I save something, it's in one of two places - Downloads folder or Gdrive. On Windows it could be in Downloads, Desktop, My Docs, some random file, Onedrive, Gdrive, etc etc. I realize this is not a big deal but given so many choices, ultimately files will multiply and spread everywhere.
- pymai 8y ago> On Windows it could be in Downloads, Desktop, My Docs they're all in you're user folder on Windows so wouldn't that be pretty much the same as the root gdrive folder and whatever subfolders you have things organised into?
- syntaxing 8y agoBought a relatively highend Chromebook for a family member and I have to say, these things are honestly really nice and perfect for the average user. I just wish there was something similar for standalone linux. The same sleek profile and price point as the Acer 14/15 series but runs some generic distro like Ubuntu natively. I know you can run Crouton but it just doesn't feel the same.
- UncleEntity 8y agoJust buy some cheap windows box with roughly the same specs and install linux on it. Unfortunately requires paying the "microsoft tax" but c'est la vie. Requires a bit of googling to ensure there's no driver issues but this is what I've done for nearly a couple decades now.
- AlexeyBrin 8y agoYou can install a pure Linux distro on a Chromebook, but you will need to update the firmware. Search for installing GalliumOS on a Chromebook. I read about other people installing Arch Linux directly on a Chromebook. (I've tried only GalliumOS.)
- Crontab 8y agoI like the idea of ChromeOS but I don't understand why anyone would want to own a computer that you can't even create a user account on without the manufacturer's permission. I am also unsure, from a privacy prospective, if it is wise to use an OS created by an advertising company.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoBecause after a day of work, most people just want to see funny pictures and check their email and login to a bank account to pay some bills. They're consumers, not producers.
- xtrapolate 8y ago> "Because after a day of work, most people just want to see funny pictures and check their email and login to a bank account to pay some bills. They're consumers, not producers." You're simply saying people want affordable technology. In that case, what is Chromebook's advantage over the competition? The market is flooded with cheap hardware, targeting those exact types of consumers.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoLack of malware and ease of use.
- krn 8y ago> In that case, what is Chromebook's advantage over the competition? Chromebooks are not about the price. There are plenty of affordable alternatives. They are about having to do zero maintenance.
- phobosdeimos 8y agoWell I haven't seen an ad on any of my computers or phones in the last 2 years. Obviously if everyone was like that the entire tech industry would have collapsed already.
- tootie 8y ago
- sebringj 8y agoI recommended my son and father to get a chromebook. They got the $600 Samsung model that flips back and has a touchscreen with stylist. I think these are great devices and do what most people need to do sans annoyances. My parents bug me much less now on how to do this or that and my son can still learn how to program javascript games not needing to crack into the core but that's still a possibility if you put it in dev mode at some point.
- mentos 8y agoMy dream is to get a light weight laptop with just enough power to send/receive input to/from my more powerful desktop where I do Gpu intensive game development on Windows. Sadly Remote Desktop is lacking in a lot of ways mainly the refresh rate makes it very difficult to resolve the rendered scene I’m working on. Any suggestions?
- ThatPlayer 8y agoSteam In-Home Streaming ? It's even got a mobile Steam Link app now if you want to use your phone with a Bluetooth controller.
- phobosdeimos 8y agoLook up how much win7 used to cost and how much you have to pay for win10. Microsoft knows that Google is the competition.
- joezydeco 8y agoFor example, new college students that had used Chrome OS at high school and families who wanted the robustness Chrome OS offers are looking for machines that are more attractive, use better materials, and are a bit faster and more powerful. The $600 machines fit that role That's really the takeaway here. GSuite has gotten its hooks deep into elementary/secondary education and now that's starting to sweep into the college market. Families also shop for new laptops around the holidays, and they'll want something that dovetails with the work kids are doing at school. If the choice is an iOS or Chrome device, the choice becomes a lot easier when they're nearly the same price.
- justadudeama 8y agoI am sure a non-trivial reason for this is every Middle School, High School, and College I have ever heard of in my area the emails are g-suite, and they all have unlimited google storage. Almost everyone I know uses Google Docs when it comes to sharing papers, and many it is their primary editor. I see why chomebooks are popular if everything else in your school is g-suite.
- joezydeco 8y agoA lot of schools also have legacy PCs that are not Chromebooks, and GSuite runs on these as well.
- beezle 8y agoUnlike Google and Apple, Microsoft really doesn't care what you run on their OS or do with their hardware. Though it is not quite 'freedom' in the OSS evangelical sense, I'll still take it any day over the other two, Chrome/Google in particular. YMMV.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- michaelmrose 8y agoSoldered in emmc storage seems kind of unattractive to me. 128GB is enough to get by but it really hurts that you can't spend $100 and have 4x as much later. Of course you could carry around an external drive but do you want to have to plug in a drive every time you wake up your computer.
- yeukhon 8y agoNo it is not. You can easily find a $600 or even less equally powerful Windows laptop.
- floatboth 8y ago> inexpensive ARM processors rather than more powerful and pricier Intel ones I want more powerful ARM ones… RK3399 is a great step in the right direction, but I'd love to see a chromebook with, say, the new Kirin
- booleandilemma 8y agoAre they really? Recently I had to choose between a chromebook and a cheap lenovo laptop and I went with the lenovo.32GB just isn’t enough space.
- woodandsteel 8y agoThis development is not surprising. From the beginning, Microsoft's brilliance been in figuring out how pc's could be used in the enterprise. It was only a lucky side-effect that it also became the king of consumer computing. A consequence of this is that MS has always focused on making their OS and applications useful for businesses, at a great sacrifice in ease of use and security for consumers. Apple jumped in to focus on ease of use and security, but their computers have always been too expensive for mass adoption. Now Google is going for the mass market with a secure and easy to use OS. Microsoft can't really fight back because to do would mean abandoning the business market. And it understandably doesn't want to do that because that's where the big bucks are. So we should expect to see ChromeOS steadily gaining in popularity, though it is an open question as to how far it will also go in the enterprise.
- notananthem 8y agoI don't see it a threat, its entirely different segmentation. Microsoft eats up lower pricepoints through its OEM/ODM partners that it can direct by issuing best practice guidances in fit, finish, features, etc and captures what it likes. It does ultra-premium but occasionally dabbles in lower segments- the thing I'm most curious to see is what it considered in the Surface 3 and other slightly more budget conscious releases. Google was crap at hardware, are they good now? They're hiring like mad right now for hardware PMs from other orgs, and that'll grab some younger talent, but they need pretty seasoned people to rebuild a whole hardware org. They have good hardware design teams but they're fractured from eng, biz, strat and more. You can be good at a network of your ODMs but that doesn't mean the product comes out to target. Chromebooks were positioned as this cheap school thing for a bit, but then the pixel kinda overshot this by a lot.. they need clear segmentation and targeting goals.
- jimmcslim 8y ago> For now, Chrome OS's success seems limited and fairly US-centric. Availability of Chromebooks in Australia is still very spotty (can’t get the Pixel easily for example) so the Microsoft hegemony isn’t being threatened Down Under!
- thiagocsf 8y agoAustralia has less than 10% of the US population. We get the scraps if and when our capitalist overlords are feeling generous.
- komali2 8y agoI'm pretty new to tech, and young in general, but I'm curious why what's happening between the different browsers regarding working together to identically implement JavaScript, thus allowing tons of modern applications to be universal across machines as long as you can install a modern browser, not happen before with other programming languages? Or did they? I don't know anything about desktop application development, but for example in college I would use PowerPoint a lot. Was there some specific limitation that made for PowerPoint to be a Windows only thing? Was it that Microsoft just refused to make it for different operating systems? Or was there no point because everyone had windows installed anyway? I'm kinda just chewing the fat here but in 2018 with iOS, osx, Android, windows, and Ubuntu being the main operating systems of machines, why'd it take the second level of abstraction of Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Edge working together to make sharing apps across machines a thing? Like, why didn't, I dunno, some cross platform python library (I know nothing about desktop apps sorry) instead be The Universalizer?
- pasabagi 8y agoI think that was basically C, and POSIX. Except Microsoft wasn't particularly interested in it, and they thought they'd be better off if they didn't make their software work for competing OS's. In a sense, most programs today are really portable. I think in the past, there was a far greater variety of machines, and people used to make programs for them specifically, in assembly, that absolutely wouldn't run on even a different generation of the same familly of machines.
- oculusthrift 8y agoThis is what Java was meant to be. You just compile for the JVM and run anywhere. Also slight nit but Powerpoint is on Mac as well and has been for decades. It actually was initially a mac program and was acquired by microsoft and has been released for both all this time. and most office products have also been on mac for decades
- scarface74 8y agoMicrosoft has always supported the Mac. It was an early Developer for the Mac in ‘84. PowerPoint was running on the Mac early on.
- XalvinX 8y agoDoes this mean there is finally a video player that can play any kind of video, doesn't crash, and has more features than just play and pause? And perhaps an audio player that does, you know, some stuff too?
- fredley 8y agoI want Chromebooks to dominate the consumer market, to be honest. Hopefully that will push Windows towards dropping bloated consumer-focussed features in lieu of a leaner OS aimed more squarely at the professional market. Currently installing Windows 10 Pro fresh installs an unimaginable quantity of crap. Why is Minecraft on a 'pro' install, and pinned to the Start Menu?
- orionblastar 8y agoHigh school my niece goes to gives students free Chromebooks to take home and work on. My son went to a high school that made us buy iPads. So there is an academic issue here and the new Chromebooks might eat iPad sales or cause Apple to make cheaper iPads. Windows laptops are a joke because low end laptops uses slow CPUs and Intel graphics. Mid end laptops for $600 have faster CPUs and Nvidia graphics but suffer preloaded bloat and virus issues a Chromebook can avoid. I got a 10 year old laptop with Linux Mint on it that runs great. Windows 7 and above run too slow on it.
- gd2 8y agoWow, 360 Hacker News comments on a Chromebook article
- sunstone 8y agoI'm not sure how this article managed to overlook the Asus C302 Chromebook flip which has been out for well over a year now and sells at the $500 price point. Very happy with mine.
- jokoon 8y agoIt seems there is a terminal in chromeos. Is there some kind of package manager? I'm just curious is a chromebook is fit for software development, and if g++/clang is running on it. If not, I would avoid it. My experience with C++ and macbooks has been pretty bad.
- torgian 8y agoShit at this point I’d rather get a used iPad and keyboard if I wanted something like a Chromebook. Or just a used thinkpad. But I guess I’m not part of the normal demographic anyway, so....
- hi41 8y agoDo Chromebooks have applications to edit videos? For applications like that don't we need PCs?
- xacky 8y agoThere's still no official 17 inch Chromebooks out. Why is Google ignoring people who prefer larger devices. Also ChromeOS is absent from high end desktops and workstations. If Google really want to put the pressure on Microsoft then they need to aim there.
- sg47 8y agoI'm looking for a good Chromebook/cheap laptop to take notes and do some lightweight programming. Criteria is good display, decent chrome performance (20 tabs open) and decent battery life (8 hours would be nice). Any recommendations?