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i3/8GB/128GB/1080p IPS + webcam Essentially they have defined "acceptable" performance across the board and given that a name. If I was looking for cheap hardw

i3/8GB/128GB/1080p IPS + webcam Essentially they have defined "acceptable" performance across the board and given that a name. If I was looking for cheap hardware it ticks the boxes just about. "AI" is just a transparent marketing attempt at throwing a hot buzzword that most people don't understand into the mix. Not awful but it really could do with a more ambitious tier, a lot of manufacturers will meet the requirements as set out (all laptops shown have 1080p displays, which is disappointing as many chromebooks had better before, 3:2 and 4k displays). We had 16GB chromebook options nearly a decade ago (mar 2015). In fact I think would have been preferable if they made this the chromebook minimum requirements and called those with less "chromebook lite" ("Go" already served as this I think?); because celeron/4GB/64GB/<1080p display/webcam is really pushing things for a new device in late 2023 onwards, even as a facebook machine. PS anyone responsible for the chromebook site out there, most of the device information pages are 404'ing; https://www.google.com/chromebook/discover/pdp-asus-chromebook-cm34-flip/sku-asus-chromebook-cm34-flip-8-gb-128-gb-amd-ryzen-3-cpu/ https://www.google.com/chromebook/discover/pdp-asus-chromebo...

Almondsetat 3y ago
You are seriously overestimating how much computing power people need and underestimating the capabilities of those laptops.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Very few people "need" more than a Pentium 4, but there are a lot of technically sufficient, practically unusable laptops out there. Modern Celerons dance that line of "usable on the web now, but who knows what next year brings" quite delicately. My benchmark is "can this play an HD Youtube video full screen". Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task, but with remote education in the state that it's at, that would make life very hard for its users. I've also seen laptops go from usable to unusable because everyone switched codecs and suddenly the hardware acceleration didn't work anymore. I think an i3 with a modest amount of RAM is a good decision for a baseline. You can get away with less, but you'll have to constantly maintain your laptop to do so, tweaking settings as the computer ages and acceleration support dies out. For most people, the device will just slow down to a crawl. An i3 and 8GB of RAM are technically overspecced today, but in five years time you'll be happy you didn't buy the Celeron.
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    11th gen intel processors or higher have AV1 decoding on top of all the other hardware accelerated codecs. This means that watching multimedia for the foreseeable future will be a lag free experience.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      Will Google Meet actually utilize that?
  - asdajksah2123 3y ago
    A pentium 4 would burn through your battery within minutes (not to mention your skin). Most people absolutely NEED better than a pentium 4.
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    A pentium 4 would leave people without any reasonable means to even play modern video codecs
  - 15457345234 3y ago
    > Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task There's not a single cheap Windows laptop that will even vaguely 'struggle' at this task given that the video decode is hardware accelerated. Even a RPI can manage that task. I have set-top box PCs with dual core Celeron 1037U processors which are more than ten years old which don't 'struggle' at this task even if you throw them a x265 video which their hardware decode ASIC doesn't support.
- thefz 3y ago
  8GB of volatile memory will be a swapfest every time a "modern" browser opens. Try it out in a VM, open 10+ pages from your bookmarks.
  - deadmutex 3y ago
    Isn't that what the base M1 Air ships with?
    - patrec 3y ago
      Apple's computers appear to have working memory management, whilst Linux doesn't. Anecdotally, an old 8GiB intel mac feels fine, an enormously more powerful 16 GiB linux laptop with Gnome is basically unusable (but runs great once you seriously bump up the RAM).
      - viraptor 3y ago
        As a dev of multiple languages, distro maintainer, general experimenter-with-things and basic ML user - Linux with 8GB works perfectly fine here. Sounds like something else is happening with your system.
        _Algernon_ 3y ago
        Linux doesn't deal well with OOM situations but those don't really apply here. 10 tabs in FF brings me to 3.5 gigs total system use, which is plenty of buffer to avoid swapping and OOM freezes.
      - walteweiss 3y ago
        So I have an old PC with i5 (Gen. 1, circa 2010 or 2011), and 4x 2 GB of ram. One 2 GB module broke and I hadn’t bothered to replace it for years, living with 6 GB. It runs Fedora Workstation 38, with Gnome. It runs it very well, and I came from more than a decade of MacBooks with 16 GB of ram. It runs it so well I don’t notice it’s just 6 GB in there.
- Theodores 3y ago
  My three year old Android budget phone has the same specs, more or less. A laptop has to have more.
  - eptcyka 3y ago
    It doesn't have to. In fact, your android phone could do all the things it does on a daily basis with far less. I'd love to get stats on how many people are not using their ultra high resolution displays at the maximum resolution and dont even know it, since it's a toggle in the settings to enable it.
- mamcx 3y ago
  The problem is not what people need but what Js app needs :)
- hedora 3y ago
  They don't come with reasonable displays. My previous experience with low-end intel hardware has been universally negative, so I assumed the i3's are terrible. Passmark says they are far better than I would have guessed: M1 performance at 4x the wattage. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100 So, either these get hot and are power-outlet-dependent, or they throttle badly. I wonder if suspend / resume works reliably. It did not for the last 4 intel laptops I owned, regardless of OS. That included Windows, MacOS and Linux. Maybe the AMD ones are decent. It's a shame about the screen (and bizarre bios) though.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    My guess is that they throttle a bit. ChromeOS machines tend to sleep and resume really well and sacrifice performance for battery. In a world full of low end garbage windows machines, it actually makes them a pretty nice little niche. Lots of consumers would likely find them much better than a lot of the $1-200 more expensive Windows laptops.
  - kcb 3y ago
    That's a desktop processor. These will all likely contain u series processors.
  - danans 3y ago
    > They don't come with reasonable displays How do you define "reasonable"? My Asus Chromebook has this display, which I find very reasonable for work: - 14” LED-backlit Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 display - Four-way NanoEdge display with 85% screen-to-body ratio - 4.9mm-thin side bezel and 7mm bottom bezel - Wide 100% sRGB color gamut - 178° wide-view technology
    - tgma 3y ago
      Yours is not the average Chromebook. It probably cost you at least $450 is my guess.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
- troupo 3y ago
  People need Google Meet. Google Meet will melt your CPU on most laptops. Most of Google's apps will, come to think of it.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Meet has the sorta unique problem of using video encoding that most modern hardware doesn't accelerate, meaning the CPU ends up taking it. Zoom just uses the typical H.264.
d3w4s9 3y ago
Have you actually used a Chromebook, like, spent more than 10 hours working on them? If not, you should try such a laptop out and then come back with your opinion. Even Chromebooks with Celeron processors are very usable and beat Windows laptops with the same specs by miles. Also want to point out high-end Chromebooks are expensive and likely don't sell very well due to its market. So here it is striking a balance. Which is why I won't be buying one of these. But other people will.
- s3p 3y ago
  Chrome OS is fundamentally limited in what it can do, so I understand why no one would want to pay for overpowered hardware. Will not be buying one either.
  - rnk 3y ago
    Are you aware of the crostini subsystem? You can run linux apps, you have a shell, it's a vm separated from the rest of the system, but everything works like native apps. X window apps look normal. You can run anything, firefox, emacsx, dev tools. So now you can run android apps safely and directly, you have the ubiquitious chrome browser world running, with a bunch of chrome-os things that making it a great environment for a lot of things. And you can run linux where you are root, you can do basically anything. The one limitation was recursive vms, I wonder if they enabled that yet.
    - slim 3y ago
      first time I hear about recursive vm. I suppose it means running a vm inside a vm. now curious. why would one want to do that ?
      - rnk 3y ago
        Think of recursive as running dev tools that are running vms in them, say running mulitpass inside crostini - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/multipass-is-a-new-tool-for-launching-virtual-machines/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/multipass-is-a-new-tool....
gunapologist99 3y ago
This, a marketing term defining a set of specifications, is also almost exactly what "Ultrabook" does, for the opposite (upper) end of the market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook Also, a Chromebook is a specifically prepared device with a highly customized Linux OS that is designed to interface very well with Google's services. Imagine if your iPhone just stored everything in iCloud and didn't need or use much local storage; that's similar to what the original vision of a Chromebook was, and it was pretty successful at that (just ask a good percentage of school-aged children in the United States.) Obviously, it's not for everyone, but it's probably perfect for a lot of potential use cases, and I know some serious developers exist who actually spend all their time on some of the great Chromebooks that are out there, and they're doing it by choice.
hackernewds 3y ago
TLDR; you are not the target market. there is an audience in India for example of billions, that use FB lite with less features due to cost, limited bandwidth, etc
danpalmer 3y ago
> PS anyone responsible for the chromebook site out there Thanks, not responsible but I've already reported one other 404'ing link to the author and will pass this on too.

Almondsetat 3y ago

You are seriously overestimating how much computing power people need and underestimating the capabilities of those laptops.

jeroenhd 3y ago
Very few people "need" more than a Pentium 4, but there are a lot of technically sufficient, practically unusable laptops out there. Modern Celerons dance that line of "usable on the web now, but who knows what next year brings" quite delicately. My benchmark is "can this play an HD Youtube video full screen". Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task, but with remote education in the state that it's at, that would make life very hard for its users. I've also seen laptops go from usable to unusable because everyone switched codecs and suddenly the hardware acceleration didn't work anymore. I think an i3 with a modest amount of RAM is a good decision for a baseline. You can get away with less, but you'll have to constantly maintain your laptop to do so, tweaking settings as the computer ages and acceleration support dies out. For most people, the device will just slow down to a crawl. An i3 and 8GB of RAM are technically overspecced today, but in five years time you'll be happy you didn't buy the Celeron.
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  11th gen intel processors or higher have AV1 decoding on top of all the other hardware accelerated codecs. This means that watching multimedia for the foreseeable future will be a lag free experience.
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    Will Google Meet actually utilize that?
- asdajksah2123 3y ago
  A pentium 4 would burn through your battery within minutes (not to mention your skin). Most people absolutely NEED better than a pentium 4.
- babypuncher 3y ago
  A pentium 4 would leave people without any reasonable means to even play modern video codecs
- 15457345234 3y ago
  > Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task There's not a single cheap Windows laptop that will even vaguely 'struggle' at this task given that the video decode is hardware accelerated. Even a RPI can manage that task. I have set-top box PCs with dual core Celeron 1037U processors which are more than ten years old which don't 'struggle' at this task even if you throw them a x265 video which their hardware decode ASIC doesn't support.
thefz 3y ago
8GB of volatile memory will be a swapfest every time a "modern" browser opens. Try it out in a VM, open 10+ pages from your bookmarks.
- deadmutex 3y ago
  Isn't that what the base M1 Air ships with?
  - patrec 3y ago
    Apple's computers appear to have working memory management, whilst Linux doesn't. Anecdotally, an old 8GiB intel mac feels fine, an enormously more powerful 16 GiB linux laptop with Gnome is basically unusable (but runs great once you seriously bump up the RAM).
    - viraptor 3y ago
      As a dev of multiple languages, distro maintainer, general experimenter-with-things and basic ML user - Linux with 8GB works perfectly fine here. Sounds like something else is happening with your system.
      - _Algernon_ 3y ago
        Linux doesn't deal well with OOM situations but those don't really apply here. 10 tabs in FF brings me to 3.5 gigs total system use, which is plenty of buffer to avoid swapping and OOM freezes.
    - walteweiss 3y ago
      So I have an old PC with i5 (Gen. 1, circa 2010 or 2011), and 4x 2 GB of ram. One 2 GB module broke and I hadn’t bothered to replace it for years, living with 6 GB. It runs Fedora Workstation 38, with Gnome. It runs it very well, and I came from more than a decade of MacBooks with 16 GB of ram. It runs it so well I don’t notice it’s just 6 GB in there.
Theodores 3y ago
My three year old Android budget phone has the same specs, more or less. A laptop has to have more.
- eptcyka 3y ago
  It doesn't have to. In fact, your android phone could do all the things it does on a daily basis with far less. I'd love to get stats on how many people are not using their ultra high resolution displays at the maximum resolution and dont even know it, since it's a toggle in the settings to enable it.
mamcx 3y ago
The problem is not what people need but what Js app needs :)
hedora 3y ago
They don't come with reasonable displays. My previous experience with low-end intel hardware has been universally negative, so I assumed the i3's are terrible. Passmark says they are far better than I would have guessed: M1 performance at 4x the wattage. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100 So, either these get hot and are power-outlet-dependent, or they throttle badly. I wonder if suspend / resume works reliably. It did not for the last 4 intel laptops I owned, regardless of OS. That included Windows, MacOS and Linux. Maybe the AMD ones are decent. It's a shame about the screen (and bizarre bios) though.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  My guess is that they throttle a bit. ChromeOS machines tend to sleep and resume really well and sacrifice performance for battery. In a world full of low end garbage windows machines, it actually makes them a pretty nice little niche. Lots of consumers would likely find them much better than a lot of the $1-200 more expensive Windows laptops.
- kcb 3y ago
  That's a desktop processor. These will all likely contain u series processors.
- danans 3y ago
  > They don't come with reasonable displays How do you define "reasonable"? My Asus Chromebook has this display, which I find very reasonable for work: - 14” LED-backlit Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 display - Four-way NanoEdge display with 85% screen-to-body ratio - 4.9mm-thin side bezel and 7mm bottom bezel - Wide 100% sRGB color gamut - 178° wide-view technology
  - tgma 3y ago
    Yours is not the average Chromebook. It probably cost you at least $450 is my guess.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
troupo 3y ago
People need Google Meet. Google Meet will melt your CPU on most laptops. Most of Google's apps will, come to think of it.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  Meet has the sorta unique problem of using video encoding that most modern hardware doesn't accelerate, meaning the CPU ends up taking it. Zoom just uses the typical H.264.

d3w4s9 3y ago

Have you actually used a Chromebook, like, spent more than 10 hours working on them? If not, you should try such a laptop out and then come back with your opinion. Even Chromebooks with Celeron processors are very usable and beat Windows laptops with the same specs by miles. Also want to point out high-end Chromebooks are expensive and likely don't sell very well due to its market. So here it is striking a balance. Which is why I won't be buying one of these. But other people will.

s3p 3y ago
Chrome OS is fundamentally limited in what it can do, so I understand why no one would want to pay for overpowered hardware. Will not be buying one either.
- rnk 3y ago
  Are you aware of the crostini subsystem? You can run linux apps, you have a shell, it's a vm separated from the rest of the system, but everything works like native apps. X window apps look normal. You can run anything, firefox, emacsx, dev tools. So now you can run android apps safely and directly, you have the ubiquitious chrome browser world running, with a bunch of chrome-os things that making it a great environment for a lot of things. And you can run linux where you are root, you can do basically anything. The one limitation was recursive vms, I wonder if they enabled that yet.
  - slim 3y ago
    first time I hear about recursive vm. I suppose it means running a vm inside a vm. now curious. why would one want to do that ?
    - rnk 3y ago
      Think of recursive as running dev tools that are running vms in them, say running mulitpass inside crostini - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/multipass-is-a-new-tool-for-launching-virtual-machines/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/multipass-is-a-new-tool....

gunapologist99 3y ago

This, a marketing term defining a set of specifications, is also almost exactly what "Ultrabook" does, for the opposite (upper) end of the market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook Also, a Chromebook is a specifically prepared device with a highly customized Linux OS that is designed to interface very well with Google's services. Imagine if your iPhone just stored everything in iCloud and didn't need or use much local storage; that's similar to what the original vision of a Chromebook was, and it was pretty successful at that (just ask a good percentage of school-aged children in the United States.) Obviously, it's not for everyone, but it's probably perfect for a lot of potential use cases, and I know some serious developers exist who actually spend all their time on some of the great Chromebooks that are out there, and they're doing it by choice.

hackernewds 3y ago

TLDR; you are not the target market. there is an audience in India for example of billions, that use FB lite with less features due to cost, limited bandwidth, etc

danpalmer 3y ago

> PS anyone responsible for the chromebook site out there Thanks, not responsible but I've already reported one other 404'ing link to the author and will pass this on too.