Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US • Hacker News Board

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#141

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, May 21, 2016, 3:43 AM UTC

j2kun wrote: post #104

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…

> And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into.

I see a lot of excitement about WebAssembly. I also see a lot of people saying how java applets were obviously a bad idea, and deserved the obscurity they fell into.

I don't really understand how to reconcile those viewpoints. :/

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#142

Post by millstone » Sat, May 21, 2016, 3:43 AM UTC

arcticfox wrote: post #13

duaneb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow I don't think that their hardware is as much an issue as their price point. As a developer you'd still be a fool (or just loaded with elbow grease) to attempt developing with a chrome book.

Why? I've developed 100% on a cloud VM for years. All I need locally is a browser. Obviously wouldn't work for some things, but as a full stack developer: no problem.

How do you test your website in other browsers, on a Chromebook?

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#143

Post by spb » Sat, May 21, 2016, 3:45 AM UTC

gizmo385 wrote: post #139

zobzu wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is actually an educational problem - specially in the US. Educated people will favor the more flexible operating systems to create things (don't think just programming, think video, pictures, whatever), dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email". That said the reality is that the majority of people are the ones that do not want to learn, and thus to be successful it is necessary to cater to them. It makes s…

> dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email" You know smart people can prefer a simple, less-modifiable system as well, right? Just because they don't share the HN communities view for an open product doesn't make them less intelligent.

Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products. The entire source tree for the OS (minus a few proprietary twigs like the Widevine Encryption Module for DRM on Netflix) is a publically-accessible Git repository, and all Chromebooks allow the user to put them into a Developer Mode, which removes the low-level restrictions the system normally runs userspace in to ensure stability and security.

Contrasted with the largely-locked-down proprietary development of Mac OS, whose few open-source concessions were shuttered a decade ago, the notion of Chrome OS being somehow less legitimately hacker-friendly just seems plainly absurd.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#144

Post by wrsh07 » Sat, May 21, 2016, 3:45 AM UTC

spb wrote: post #137

j2kun wrote: post #104

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…

Moreover, Chromebooks, when paired with a good cloud IDE like https://c9.io , are excellent for writing code - more so than any "traditional" OS, since the local system is only dedicating resources toward keeping the interface responsive, and not wasting them on background distractions like local search indexing or filesystem defragmentation. Meanwhile, if you accidentally forkbomb a cloud development server, your mu…

Of course this all works on a MacBook, too. But it's a little sad that my high powered, sleek computer is only being used for SSH...

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#145

Post by 1st_throwaway » Sat, May 21, 2016, 3:47 AM UTC

curt15 wrote: post #106

mixedmath wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a Chromebook. But I also put it in devmode, put on Crouton, and run a full-blown Ubuntu on it as well. Everyone I know with a Chromebook does the same thing. Then it becomes an inexpensive Linux Laptop that handles some things automatically.

Do you find the anemic storage limiting?

A 128gb usb drive costs very little now.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#146

Post by seabrookmx » Sat, May 21, 2016, 3:55 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #141

j2kun wrote: post #104

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…

> And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into. I see a lot of excitement about WebAssembly. I al…

Web assembly gets first class access to browser API's and the DOM, which Applets never did. Applets had virtually zero ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in. This paired with the fact that most users at the time (on Windows) had to download additional nagware to run them, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Web assembly is a continuation of JavaScript and ASM JS and is poised to be a much better solution for all parties.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#147

Post by spb » Sat, May 21, 2016, 3:55 AM UTC

pkaye wrote: post #111

cliveb wrote: post #94

Chromebook give me a bash$ https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n0wyA608k4eWGd9-NUh8... My 2008 Macbook died in March, that triggered me to mostly use my 2013 Pixel for dev. Although I do have an 27 iMac at home. My dev is mostly Web Dev + GCP and moving to Firebase (canonically all front end dev). Hence even though I have Ubuntu via Crouton, I rarely need a local Fuse file system. For node work and CLI work I spi…

Is this the Google Cloud Storage? Is it accessed as a remote file system?

For apps written against the "native" Chrome API, Google Drive is presented as a filesystem the same way as the local filesystem - any service can expose itself similarly via the [chrome.fileSystemProvider API][1].

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/fileSystemProvider

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#148

Post by rtpg » Sat, May 21, 2016, 4:04 AM UTC

themartorana wrote: post #134

ginkgotree wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more. It honestly still seems nuts to me that the browser hasn't taken over the whole OS experience. It's clear that locally installed software is going away. But it's happening on a system that was designed decades ago to request a single markup document, and return it in a single response. Obviously, the browser has matured. JavaScript has matured. We now have more protocols to work with than just HT…

Locally installed software is, if anything, more prevalent than ever before. Let's put aside mobile for a minute that so changed the landscape towards locally installed that it put Google's revenue model on its heels. You see WhatsApp, Slack, etc., releasing Electron apps just to try to appear locally installable. If there wasn't such a high demand for it, and people weren't clamoring for a stand-alone app instead of…

Right, but it could be a browser feature right?

The main issue (for example in OS X) is that everything gets subsumed by the browser process so things like Command+Tab don't work as well. There are, of course, also OS integration issues, but over time I think we'll get pretty far along on that front.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#149

Post by taurath » Sat, May 21, 2016, 4:15 AM UTC

SyneRyder wrote: post #65

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their MacBook Pro line does have (and has had for some time) some of the best hardware available. Perhaps it doesn't match purpose-built gaming notebooks, and definitely not desktops, but they usually are the first to have a new Intel processor, have newish graphics hardware, pioneered mainstream PCIe storage and high-resolution displays...You might pay a lot for what you get, but there's no doubt it's good hardware.

Not sure about being first with the new processors. I don't think the MacBook Pro has got Skylake yet, has it? Though with all the power management problems on the Surface Book, Apple may have dodged a bullet by being slow on Skylake. As for the graphics chips, you're limited to Intel integrated graphics unless you get the high-end 15" MBP with the Radeon. I generally like my MacBook Pro, but I'm less convinced it's…

They don't have skylake yet - but its been about 370 days since the last refresh. If they don't update at macworld next month they'll give up half their damn market share.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#150

Post by ralmidani » Sat, May 21, 2016, 4:18 AM UTC

1st_throwaway wrote: post #145

curt15 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find the anemic storage limiting?

A 128gb usb drive costs very little now.

I have the Samsung Chromebook 2 (Exynos CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage).

I tried using a Class 10 MicroSD card to hold an Ember-CLI project, and running commands on it was intolerably slow.