Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 426 posts

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#101

Post by muro »

csomar wrote: post #62

No 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 Ph…

You 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.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#102

Post by z_open »

matt2000 wrote: post #75
anoncoward111 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lubuntu 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

"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.

Graphical package managers exist now.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#103

Post by tomc1985 »

matt2000 wrote: post #67
praseodym wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rewrite without full backwards compatibility just wouldn’t have taken off. Even today, developers are reluctant to embrace the new Universal Windows Platform that sheds a lot of the legacy Win32 brings with it.

That's why I was suggesting running Win7 in an emulator for legacy apps.

Win7 did just that with WinXP

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#104

Post by nextos »

paulcarroty wrote: post #99
nextos wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones. I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to r…

> if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. It's doesn't resolve the tracking issues.

Why not? I'm running vanilla AOSP with F-Droid apps only. No Google Apps framework.

Threats are limited then to regular baseband radio issues. I know I could be doing better if we had open hardware, but that's the most practical solution I can implement today I think.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#105

Post by londons_explore »

reaperducer wrote: post #31
ChrisSD wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'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/2...

FTA: "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get." I wonder what the maximum penetration was for Windows OSes on phon…

To be fair, after over a decade of trying, Apple still only has 15% market share.

If Microsoft had the other 85%, they'd be in a good position.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#106

Post by muro »

londons_explore wrote: post #28
rblatz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

G-Suite is a thing, and so is office 365

Goodle Docs is a great product, but for serious uses, it's sorely lacking in the features department. It's odd, because even features from the 90's like mail merge are missing. Mail merge as a feature is something most coders could automate in a few hours. Why isn't it in the product so the rest of the world can use it? How about footnotes? References? Multi-column layouts? A mixture of portrait and landscape pages?…

Footnotes work in Google docs

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#107

Post by Fnoord »

nextos wrote: post #84
sarcasmic wrote: post #24

Any 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 Chromeboo…

I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones. I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to r…

> Xiaomi laptops are excellent machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components)

Which ones exactly? Do you have resources?

The ones I've seen sport Nvidia GPUs [1] [2]. Which means no Wayland, and only proprietary drivers. Not "excellent" or "just Intel components" in my book.

[1] https://www.banggood.com/XiaoMi-Gaming-Laptop-Intel-Core-I7-...

[2] https://www.banggood.com/Xiaomi-Pro-Notebook-15_6-Inch-Intel...

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#108

Post by criddell »

mavhc wrote: post #17
matt2000 wrote: post #15

I 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…

They did, Windows RT

I think that's the point they should have hard forked Windows. Have the business version continue on with the Windows 7 UI and the consumer version with Metro and ARM. All the things like touch support, Cortana, Groove Music, the XBox app, Weather, News, etc should have been available only on the consumer version of Windows.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#109

Post by badminton1 »

There 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.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#110

Post by anoncoward111 »

z_open wrote: post #76
anoncoward111 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lubuntu 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

Don't the pre-installed ones come with a graphical package manager?

Yeah and like I find it really hard to believe that a casual user who really doesn't want to spend $600 on a chromebook can learn how to copy paste basic command line stuff on the very rare occasion that what they need isn't available graphically
Post reply on HN