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I finished grad school in 2009 and have been using a Cr-48 since January. I am now thinking about how I will advise my kids. My oldest is 9, so a its a ways off

I finished grad school in 2009 and have been using a Cr-48 since January. I am now thinking about how I will advise my kids. My oldest is 9, so a its a ways off, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if she is expected to have a computing device by high school. I would not recommend the Cr48 experience to a student. The lack of utility offline is very non-trivial. During a month in Japan, the Cr-48 was literally nothing more than a flat surface to set my MacBook on. I left my iPad home with the family, and I really wished I had brought that instead of either laptop. The smartphone/tablet operating systems are much better suited to mobile computing, specifically because they do support local storage. Syncing with the cloud is not the same as dedicating all storage to the cloud. Very, very different. In-browser apps like SourceKit are as close as it gets right now, but as soon as you pull the network connection, even SourceKit gets really flakey. I like SourceKit, but I think the supporting architecture just isn't ready yet. I can't over-state how much this has made the Cr-48 a non-starter for me. My full Cr-48 review here: http://wherein.posterous.com/ http://wherein.posterous.com/

zmmmmm 16y ago
> The lack of utility offline is very non-trivial. So the question is, does $20 / month get you connectivity as well? Fingers crossed it includes a data plan sufficient for most student's use, in which case it could be a very economical way for them to get a good mobile data connection without a prohibitive contract.
- niels_olson 16y ago
  You can't buy 100% connectivity. Or even a reliable 85%. It's simply not available in the marketplace. You drop enough packets and some part of your work flow is going to fail, likely taking your data with it.
bane 16y ago
I suspect that a hybrid approach will win out in the in, with local (disk) storage so ridiculously cheap these days. A system should just local sync, but make it appear that everything is working off the cloud. No connection? No problem, just use the local data instead (and make it seamless to the user). A 400GB spinning disk large enough for all the data a user is likely to use with a cloud service runs ~$25 these days.

zmmmmm 16y ago

> The lack of utility offline is very non-trivial. So the question is, does $20 / month get you connectivity as well? Fingers crossed it includes a data plan sufficient for most student's use, in which case it could be a very economical way for them to get a good mobile data connection without a prohibitive contract.

niels_olson 16y ago
You can't buy 100% connectivity. Or even a reliable 85%. It's simply not available in the marketplace. You drop enough packets and some part of your work flow is going to fail, likely taking your data with it.

bane 16y ago

I suspect that a hybrid approach will win out in the in, with local (disk) storage so ridiculously cheap these days. A system should just local sync, but make it appear that everything is working off the cloud. No connection? No problem, just use the local data instead (and make it seamless to the user). A 400GB spinning disk large enough for all the data a user is likely to use with a cloud service runs ~$25 these days.