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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

#381

Post by MartijnBraam »

bitL wrote: post #119
detaro wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the data that chromebooks have shorter useful lives than other laptops in the same price class? Other laptops on average? It's possible that's the case, but not obvious to me.

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 have two Acer c720 Chromebooks that outlived several laptops and a hilarious amount of tablets.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#382

Post by Const-me »

nunodonato wrote: post #372
Const-me wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it wasn't for Office and the ecosystem around it, I don't think many firms would opt for Microsoft products. Many firms and people need Windows software, MS Office is just one example. You want to edit pictures, Photoshop only runs on Windows and OSX. You want to build things, AutoCAD only runs on Windows. You want to produce music, Cubase only runs on Windows and OSX.

there are great alternatives for all of that

Not if you’re doing it professionally. Several reasons, BTW they also apply to MS Office.

Adobe/Autodesk/Steinberg software is just better than alternatives.

You can’t use Photoshop filters / Autocad addons / VST instruments with non-native apps. At least not reliably.

You can’t reliably exchange documents unless you use original software.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#384

Post by inapis »

omegabravo wrote: post #351
hoosieree wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every other OS I've used recently (MacOS, Ubuntu, Centos, RHEL, ChromeOS) doesn't require special knowledge or extra work to remove pre-installed spyware/bloatware. They may well have crap installed, but at least they're subtle about it.

I remember Ubuntu coming installed with Amazon links. It certainly did require special knowledge to remove it. https://www.lifewire.com/remove-amazon-application-from-ubun... At least with Windows you can just right click, uninstall. That is until vendors break that mechanism too

If you are using Ubuntu, then you atleast have some knowledge about the OS and would be savvy enough to Google and run some commands on the terminal to fix it.

Compared to Windows, which has a huge user base with absolutely no understanding of how the OS works and what to do if you don't like it OOTB.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#385

Post by chrismorgan »

c5karl wrote: post #338
bena wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of ways they aren't/weren't. Office does a lot of things their own way and without a lot of the cross-compatibility that's a feature of most Microsoft products. That's why you'll find you'll be able to do something in Office, but other Microsoft programs won't. Or vice versa. Like Notepad and Internet Explorer are pretty much just containers for certain Windows controls. Controls Office don't use. They roll…

> Wouldn't surprise me to find out that Office had their own browser rendering engine that didn't rely on anything in IE. I'm not sure what the situation is now, but for a long time Outlook used MS Word, not MSIE, to render HTML email messages. Word is a terrible web browser, so that made it next to impossible to design templates for things like email newsletters that would look & behave sensibly in Outlook.

Outlook 2003 switched to the IE renderer, then for what I consider to be terrible reasons they switched back to MSO in 2007, and still use it in Outlook and even Windows Mail now. (The reasons I recall were bugs in the editor and security—.)

For people that aren’t in the know: the MSO engine is basically a very incomplete and quite buggy implementation of the HTML 3.2 specification. From where I stand, it looks like the entire thing is a binary blob that essentially hasn’t been touched at all for over twenty years. Literally.

Microsoft switching back to MSO breathed new life into an entire industry of people with esoteric, hard-won knowledge about the eldritch affairs of HTML for email. Without it, HTML for email would not be such a disaster. (Sure, there are other awful email clients, but Outlook is by far the most terrible that is used much these days. If it had tightened its game, other bad clients would have been much more like to fix theirs too.)

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#386

Post by jokoon »

It seems there is a terminal in chromeos. Is there some kind of package manager? I'm just curious is a chromebook is fit for software development, and if g++/clang is running on it.

If not, I would avoid it. My experience with C++ and macbooks has been pretty bad.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#387

Post by notatcomputer68 »

apozem wrote: post #314
mabbo wrote: post #5

I was an intern at Microsoft the day that ChromeOS was announced. Conveniently, a few days later the head of Windows was giving a talk to all the interns. Overall, spoke well, but during Q&A someone asked him what he thought about ChromeOS. He laughed. He said it was a joke. He made it very clear that he didn't understand what Google was even thinking. And that stuck such a sour chord on me. Here's a company well kno…

Speaking of companies laughing at competitors they shouldn't, my father has a great story from his time at IBM. He was in a meeting where they were talking about Amazon Web Services, which had just launched. He said an IBM executive called it "stupid" and asked, "Who would ever pay for a server with a credit card?" This blew my mind, because now that AWS is crushing IBM's cloud offerings, the answer to his question i…

The transaction cost of fully automatic flow and pay with credit card is unbeatable. For a big project it may not matter but for a small one it does.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#389

Post by edent »

sdegutis wrote: post #137
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…

> $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor Honestly this is one of the biggest things I liked about Apple computers since switching to them in 2007. They're so clean and pure compared to Windows which always comes with bloatware. Even the basic drivers you actually need for the computer to work usually come with some sort of bloatware awful UI programs that need to be in…

My MacBook Air has a DVD player app preloaded - despite having no DVD slot. It also has a chess game. And iTunes. And I can't remove any of them.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#390

Post by yayana »

jimmcslim wrote: post #255
datguacdoh wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the b…

But having to set up a whole Google account for multiple profiles on a Chromebook is a lot more ponderous that simply creating another profile as is possible with Chrome running on Windows/Linux/Mac OS.

That doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me. On all those other systems the built-in browser has to be replaced with Chrome as the first step to any utility while on chromeOS you can use a primary user and a guest user with a working browser having never done a single setup task.
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