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Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

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

#151

Post by cliveb »

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?

Google Compute Engine--Debian VM--for remote dev machine. I'm using Google Cloud Storage for static web sites. It is accessed as a remote file system. https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/hosting-static-website...

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

#152

Post by khedoros »

spb wrote: post #143
gizmo385 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products.

The OS itself is pretty open. If I'm not mistaken though, if you put it into dev mode, you get a scary screen at every reboot, and an opportunity to hit space to re-enable OS verification, and apparently wipe out whatever modifications you've made to the system. In theory, actually rebooting the system should be a fairly rare event, but that's one of the reasons I haven't considered a Chromebook. I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right?

Macs are basically the opposite; the OS itself is closed, but the hardware isn't difficult to install some other OS on. You've got options, because you aren't wedded to the software.

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

cs702 wrote: post #115
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…

The "Year of the Linux Desktop" FINALLY arrived, and the HN community finds out about it after the fact from the mainstream media...

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by ekianjo »

cs702 wrote: post #115
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…

The "Year of the Linux Desktop" FINALLY arrived, and the HN community finds out about it after the fact from the mainstream media...

Well that's not the Linux Desktop we were referring to all along, to be fair. And the whole ChromeOS stack beyond the kernel is closed-source. Hardly a win for "Linux", unless you assimilate the OS to the Kernel.

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

#155

Post by ekianjo »

ginkgotree wrote: post #128
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…

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…

> It's clear that locally installed software is going away

Where performance matters, locally installed software is NOT going away anytime soon. Oh, just take gaming, for example. Good luck making AAA games run in your browser.

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

#156

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem

Wow, you'd have to wonder how everyone here actually learned how to use computers back when there was no Internet and no help from your friends because you were the only one using them.

It's NEVER been easier to use a computer nowadays, not just because they have become better designed and more user-friendly, but also because documentation and help is readily available everywhere at every corner.

Giving up when facing an issue these days is just called laziness, nothing else.

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

#157

Post by witty_username »

yardie wrote: post #55

I'm curious, but is a Chromebook useful in offline mode? My family and I have been on sabbatical sailing half the planet so far. Internet has been a big headache as Iridium tops out at 2400bps. And data plans in developing countries and islands can be extremely expensive, up to $1/MB. I've found our android tablets to be more crashy offline as apps that can't get an internet connection go braindead, blank, or just ki…

> I'm curious, but is a Chromebook useful in offline mode? My family and I have been on sabbatical sailing half the planet so far. Internet has been a big headache as Iridium tops out at 2400bps. And data plans in developing countries and islands can be extremely expensive, up to $1/MB.

Not used a Chromebook, but I assume whatever works in offline mode in Chrome (e.g. Google Docs and Amazon Kindle) works in a Chromebook.

> As a parent I'm also concerned about the privacy aspects. I believe schools get a special Chromebook that cuts back on the tracking, does this hold true for their retail models?

I don't think Chromebooks have any additional tracking beyond what Chrome has.

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

#158

Post by thaumasiotes »

seabrookmx wrote: post #146
thaumasiotes wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bet…

Why would they need the ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in? They can communicate with themselves. What's the difference between a single-page web application in WebAssembly and a single-page java applet in java bytecode? What's the DOM adding? Suppose I want to run Quake in the browser. Applets already do that. It's not a new idea or a new technology.

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

#159

Post by greggman »

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…

Who's clamoring for apps? AFAICT that's only the companies that want the apps because it lets them spy on their customers in more ways.

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

#160

Post by vitd »

zobzu wrote: post #109
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…

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…

Do you realize that selfies and emails are creative endeavors? It takes a lot of work to take a good picture or compose an email that conveys anything useful.
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