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$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

arstechnica.com

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Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#161

Post by nickjj »

paulcarroty wrote: post #122
nickjj wrote: post #79

A few years ago I picked up a $300 Chromebook, spent $50 to upgrade the SSD size (swapped the SSD card in it) and now I run GalliumOS on it (native xubuntu but optimized for Chromebooks). So for $350 you get a 1080p IPS panel laptop that weighs under 3 pounds and has an SD card, headphone jack and other goodies. It easily runs a bunch of Dockerized web apps without being slow. One of the best portable computing devic…

So for $350 you can buy much better laptop on ebay. Example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-PROBOOK-650-G2-I7-6600U-8GB-256G...

The Chromebook is brand new straight from Amazon.

Google says your ebay laptop costs somewhere between $900 and $1,400 in new condition depending on what model it is. Yours is also "smashed and cracked" with no AC adapter based on the description.

I don't really mind if there's something faster because I spend time developing 10,000+ line Dockerized Rails apps with the Chromebook along with having a bunch of browser tabs open and streaming music, etc.. and it all runs great.

That Chromebook I mentioned is just a perfect storm of high quality components at a good price. I hope it lasts another 5+ years.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#162

Post by Theodores »

paulcarroty wrote: post #141
benplumley wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a listing for a second-hand laptop, if the Chromebook had been bought second-hand too it would have probably cost significantly less than this.

This "second-hand laptop" is much more powerful than chromebook and can be found for less money. I just use the same price range.

But you don't get the minimalist Chromebook keyboard.

Plus laptop CPU thermal management has a lot of problems. I would prefer a modern and fanless Chromebook to an old laptop where the fans are whirring away the whole time for no evidence of performance gain.

I am hoping that there will soon be an eight generation Pentium inside a high end Chromebook with that Chromebook running linux things like a web server natively. No idea how the IDE is going to work running that way but that is where I would like my dev environment to be going.

You can still get refurbished Chromebooks, I bought a Dell one and I think that come the apocalypse there will be cockroaches and my Dell Chromebook running, if nothing else, as it is that indestructible. Plus charging seems optional. It goes for days.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#163

Post by osrec »

adrianN wrote: post #123
osrec wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not denying the amount of work gone into LibreOffice, however I'm not sure if I agree with you on the approach (this will probably be an unpopular opinion). I find the entire ecosystem of LibreOffice a bit clunky, and it wouldn't surprise me if there is a lot of technical debt that would need to be understood before we could make any sort of contribution. Don't know why, but my gut says starting afresh would allow us…

Well, if you fail at improving Libre Office to a state where you're satisfied with it, you still improved Libre Office. If you fail to write something better than Calc, all effort is lost.

I agree with what you're saying, but I'm not going to be pessimistic about the endeavour! I think, given time, we can build something that solves at least some use cases better than Calc.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#164

Post by osrec »

fooker wrote: post #120
osrec wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not denying the amount of work gone into LibreOffice, however I'm not sure if I agree with you on the approach (this will probably be an unpopular opinion). I find the entire ecosystem of LibreOffice a bit clunky, and it wouldn't surprise me if there is a lot of technical debt that would need to be understood before we could make any sort of contribution. Don't know why, but my gut says starting afresh would allow us…

The problem with starting from scratch for an Excel alternative is the classic quote : "Everyone needs 10% of the features Excel offers, but is a different 10%."

I don't disagree with you, however someone needs to take up the challenge. Perhaps by creating a base that can be plugged into more easily than LibreOffice or Excel would help encourage development by the community (much like atom and its plugins)

Basically, I'm not happy with the status quo that we have no real alternative to Excel on Linux.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#165

Post by mikelward »

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…

> Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is [...] anemic on memory and storage

From the first link in the article:

> The Yoga Chromebook is an altogether more powerful system. It has a four-core/eight-thread 8th-generation Core i5 processor, with 8GB RAM and either 64 or 128GB of eMMC storage.

i5 CPU/8 GB RAM/128 GB eMMC puts it in MacBook/Surface territory.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#166

Post by Jyaif »

disconnected wrote: post #96

This article misses the mark completely by assuming that Microsoft still needs Windows to stay afloat. This hasn't been true for years. They have realized that it doesn't matter whether you use Windows, Chrome OS, Android or Linux, or anything else: everything is in the cloud now, so the OS is pretty much irrelevant. Azure, Office 365 and heck, even Linkedin are doing great: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/m…

What do you think would be the share percentage of Bing if they didn't have windows?

So yes, they do care about owning a successful platform.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#167

Post by lotsofpulp »

londons_explore wrote: post #105
reaperducer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why should Apple care about the other 85% of the market if all the profit margin is in the 15% they have?

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#168

Post by lotsofpulp »

Crontab wrote: post #156

I like the idea of ChromeOS but I don't understand why anyone would want to own a computer that you can't even create a user account on without the manufacturer's permission. I am also unsure, from a privacy prospective, if it is wise to use an OS created by an advertising company.

Because after a day of work, most people just want to see funny pictures and check their email and login to a bank account to pay some bills. They're consumers, not producers.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#169

Post by ChrisSD »

moksha256 wrote: post #117
jenscow wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, this "vendor crap" is now part of the OS.

It's even worse than that. There's 2 types of crap now: vendor crap and Windows crap. You can avoid vendor crap by reinstalling a fresh version of Windows from Microsoft, but you'll still get Microsoft crap (i.e., various apps from the Microsoft store pre-installed with links prominently displayed on the Start menu).

These are what Microsoft calls "suggestions" (aka adverts). I think they only actually install when you first click on them.

Fortunately they're UWP apps so are easy to completely remove. Turning off the "Show suggestions" settings will stop them coming back.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#170

Post by grandinj »

osrec wrote: post #163
adrianN wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you fail at improving Libre Office to a state where you're satisfied with it, you still improved Libre Office. If you fail to write something better than Calc, all effort is lost.

I agree with what you're saying, but I'm not going to be pessimistic about the endeavour! I think, given time, we can build something that solves at least some use cases better than Calc.

Libreoffice hacker here. Calc is one of the nicer parts of the codebase. Don’t underestimate the enormous list of features that are required in a modern spreadsheet engine. We’re talking 100s of man-years of coding. Come join us and make it better. Or task one of the available consultancies to implement the features you want.
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