https://www.microcenter.com/product/649971/evolve-iii-maestr... On sale $59.99 ; regular price $79.99. Smallish keyboard however...
Sadly it appears to only have read only storage (64GB ROM.) Kinda cool in a retro way I guess.
Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
61–70 of 186 posts
Re: Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
#62That thing is like 70% of the performance of my 2014 Thinkpad which cost ~20x as much in today's money.
The only metrics where it does really badly is the small amount of RAM and storage.
Re: Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
#63I love these cheap ARM laptops. I wish there was better support for the hardware, though. I have been using an Asus c101pa as a second laptop for so long that it's outlasted three thinkpads, but e.g. there is still no Linux support for the GPU and probably never will be.
The c100 / c101 Asus Flip is my favorite laptop form factor. Durable, extremely lightweight, loved the keyboard. Felt great in the hands. And inexpensive enough to make theft a non-worry. I wish Asus (or someone) would still make them.
That one was a cool design
Re: Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
#64Can anyone comment on external displays? The last time I tried this was about 5 years ago. I had a Samsung chromebook which was a great little device, but the font rendering connected to an external display was too terrible.
Re: Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
#65'm not going to lie -- this screen really is quite hard on the eyes. It's a step down if your normal laptop costs 25X AS MUCH
what does he mean. is is blurry or too bright?
Yes, computers get way cheaper when you exclude windows and name brand parts.
Re: Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
#66> Like, real Linux, not some weird virtualized or translated environment. Ah, no. It is very much specifically in a container inside a VM. Now, full credit where it's due: You're unlikely to notice. Performance is good, they've done work integrating it (filesystem integration, forwarding windows to the host display servers through Sommelier). But native it is not. (Details: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumo…
Oh dear, that is even more locked down than many expected and much more distant from the typical Linux distro that the many Linux Desktop fans have been used to.
Either way, it doesn't matter, I'd expect whatever is running in ChromeOS (Linux Kernel) to be replaced by Fuchsia (Zircon kernel) underneath. They will more likely keep the 'ChromeOS' name to limit the confusion and that will be what these devices like that $100 Chromebook will be running in the future.
So it will be even more locked down and tightly controlled.
Re: Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
#67This reads like an advertisement and the constant comparisons with Apple products is weird. I can only assume the comparisons are being made because he or the people around him use very expensive Macbooks, but It doesn't help that this thread was written by the submitter and that he happens to be an engineer at Google talking about how great this cheap Chromebook is. Looking past that, It's good for developers to hav…
Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Pretty sure that's for HN comments, not submissions?
Re: Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
#68I wonder what landfill alot of these things will end up on in a few years. Be good to see more framework style stuff with a focus on long term usage.
I suspect Chromebooks will last longer than el cheapo Windows PCs. When a "disposable" $100 computer lasts six years... a $1,000 computer won't last 60 years. You'd have to show that e-waste has an incredibly high cost to justify that thinking.
Re: Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
#69> Like, real Linux, not some weird virtualized or translated environment. Ah, no. It is very much specifically in a container inside a VM. Now, full credit where it's due: You're unlikely to notice. Performance is good, they've done work integrating it (filesystem integration, forwarding windows to the host display servers through Sommelier). But native it is not. (Details: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumo…
Oh dear, that is even more locked down than many expected and much more distant from the typical Linux distro that the many Linux Desktop fans have been used to. Either way, it doesn't matter, I'd expect whatever is running in ChromeOS (Linux Kernel) to be replaced by Fuchsia (Zircon kernel) underneath. They will more likely keep the 'ChromeOS' name to limit the confusion and that will be what these devices like that…
Microkernels have always been slower than monolithic kernels, never faster.
There is zero chance that Zircon will be faster than Linux.
The classic example is Mach from CMU:
"When Mach was first being seriously used in the 2.x versions, performance was slower than traditional monolithic operating systems, perhaps as much as 25%... When Mach 3 attempted to move most of the operating system into user-space, the overhead became higher still: benchmarks between Mach and Ultrix on a MIPS R3000 showed a performance hit as great as 67% on some workloads."
Re: Unboxing a $100 Chromebook
#70That's nice, but Chromebooks are designed to become e-waste after a period of only a few years (updates stop after the device gets to be a few years old).
You can easily unlock them and install a real operating system.
I don't have any Chromebooks but plenty of 1st/2nd generation Chromeboxes -the hardware and specs are pretty much the same- and after "liberating" them they became pretty good platforms for many tasks. One of them in fact displaced permanently my Raspberry PI 4 as Kodi media player.
For more information: https://mrchromebox.tech/