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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

#221

Post by debaserab2 »

DennisAleynikov wrote: post #182
lotsofpulp wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I guess apple is totally okay with being a minority of the market then since they're doubling down on proprietary sensors and apps that only work in their own ecosystem. they can ignore the 85% if they want. The 85% of the market will ignore them back in turn.

They "double-downed" on that decision ten years ago, and now they are the most profitable company in the world. I think it's safe to say whatever bet they made paid off handsomely.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#222

Post by tonyedgecombe »

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…

Doesn't Office 365 still run on the desktop? It's a bit of a stretch booking that as cloud revenue.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#223

Post by bitL »

UncleEntity wrote: post #187
bitL wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of a lifetime could a device with soldered on 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage have? How much repurposed could it be? Pricier Chromebooks with HiDPI screens and Core-M or better processors are still castrated in one way or the other comparing to general computing devices, yet approaching their price levels. What's the point for a developer? "It just works"? "It's just safe!" due to mandatory secure boot a…

I doubt a developer would buy such an underpowered machine in the first place. That said, I currently use a laptop that's seriously underpowered (by choice when I bought the thing ~7 years ago) with 4GB of RAM running Fedora and it does everything I need -- never once have I found I wasn't able to compile whatever random code I happen to be playing with at the moment. If ever I had to do serious dev work (like, it wa…

I use a netbook with Atom CPU as my retro gaming device and it's fine for that. But with Chromebooks you are one accidental key press during the boot away from completely wiping out your custom OS you managed to install with quite a bit of difficulty. Chromebooks are very restricted, intentionally, you can't really compare them to similarly specced notebooks that could be easily repurposed for less demanding tasks.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#224

Post by joezydeco »

justadudeama wrote: post #191
joezydeco wrote: post #186

For example, new college students that had used Chrome OS at high school and families who wanted the robustness Chrome OS offers are looking for machines that are more attractive, use better materials, and are a bit faster and more powerful. The $600 machines fit that role That's really the takeaway here. GSuite has gotten its hooks deep into elementary/secondary education and now that's starting to sweep into the co…

I am sure a non-trivial reason for this is every Middle School, High School, and College I have ever heard of in my area the emails are g-suite, and they all have unlimited google storage. Almost everyone I know uses Google Docs when it comes to sharing papers, and many it is their primary editor. I see why chomebooks are popular if everything else in your school is g-suite.

A lot of schools also have legacy PCs that are not Chromebooks, and GSuite runs on these as well.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#225

Post by c0achmcguirk »

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?…

> Mail Merge

I haven't needed that in over 15 years, but if you need this, install this add-on for free [1].

> footnotes

Insert > Footnote

> References

Tools > Research, Cite as Footnote

> Multi-column layouts

Format > Columns

> A mixture of portrait and landscape pages?

This is hard to do in Word too. If you really need this, make two Google docs (landscape, portrait, and then a Word Doc that integrates the two that you keep in Read-Only mode).

But really, why is this needed for serious uses and considered "seriously lacking?"

> Captions on tables

This could be done by just inserting text and formatting the way you want. I don't think you can generate a table of tables though. Do you have a list of commonly used "hobbled" features? None of these are something I've had a need to do for decades.

[1] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mail-merge/lclhkda...

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#226

Post by nextos »

Fnoord wrote: post #143
nextos wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air 12 inch, Intel HD Graphics: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/xiaomi-air-12-review...

Good bang for the buck but I want at least 8 GB DDR4 in a new laptop (bought in 2018), and preferably also TB3 and an AMD GPU. Regardless of the other unnecessary or lacking features Macbook laptops have (butterfly keyboard, touchbar, magsafe, USB-A ports come to mind) if you want a decent amount of RAM and an AMD GPU you pay the jackpot price on MBPs.

i5 has 8 GB of RAM and still an Intel HD card. Sadly, it's not fanless. Same as with MS Surface and virtually all fanless m3 setups, there's no 8 GB option.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#227

Post by krn »

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…

> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?

GalliumOS[1] is a Ubuntu-based Linux distribution optimized for Chromebooks with a huge list of supported devices[2].

> Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.

I find Lenovo Thinkpad E4*0 series to be the best low-cost, high build-quality Linux development machines, since they start from $569.99, allow a wide range of hardware customizations[3], and meet Mil-SPEC durability standards[4].

[1] https://galliumos.org/

[2] https://wiki.galliumos.org/Hardware_Compatibility

[3] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-e-ser...

[4] https://www.lenovo.com/hk/en/thisisthinkpad/innovation/think...

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#228

Post by nextos »

paulcarroty wrote: post #200
nextos wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vanilla AOSP still use Google DNS by default and Google servers for an internet connection checker.

I patch that, and a few other things. It's a poor man's CopperheadOS.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#229

Post by samstave »

rogerbinns wrote: post #206
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…

> Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? They aren't ideal. But they do have a good alternative that is in its late beta stages. Typically you could run a Linux distro in a chroot on the chromebook, after putting it into developer mode. Unfortunately the chroot does have limits - fox example it doesn't get another IP address so yo…

Maybe you know the answer to this question I have always wanted:

I want to be able to run multiple OSs/Installations-of-the-same-OS on a single machine such that I can swap between "running" OSs - meaning, I want to have one OS sleep while I use the other.

So, if I have windows and ubuntu on the same machine - I dont want to reboot, I want to just put one to sleep and wake the other one up...

OR Ideally - I want to be able to run them side-by-side in some manner that is greater than a VM running on top of the other... My System76 laptop has dual SSD drives in it, I'd like to have both machines running, with half the resources dedicated to each, and have my KVM switch between them.

Anything come clsoe to this?

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