11–20 of 96 posts
Coming in even or slightly faster (in most benchmarks) than an Intel Atom D525 from over two years ago is "crazy fast"? I'm impressed with the Chromebook overall and I think it's a cool product but talk about a bait-and-switch title.
What's with the only 6.5 hour battery life? I would buy it if it had >=9. Edit: it's a serious question :) I am really wondering why the Nexus 10 has 9 hours and this 6.5? Please Google, add a 3rd 'chromebook without chrome os' which is a Nexus 10 (Android but hopefully soon Ubuntu hacked) with a click-on keyboard (with battery) for $350. Thanks!
Here's some real-world data: The 3rd gen iPad has a 42 watt-hour battery. The 11" Air has a 35 watt-hour battery. The Air is 25% larger in one dimension and over 50% heavier, but it still can't fit the same amount of batteries as the iPad.
And of course tablets typically have slower processors, less memory, and less flash than laptops. Their lower specs mean tablets draw less power.
With so much going against them, I'm surprised that some laptops manage to come close to tablets in battery life.
What's with the only 6.5 hour battery life? I would buy it if it had >=9. Edit: it's a serious question :) I am really wondering why the Nexus 10 has 9 hours and this 6.5? Please Google, add a 3rd 'chromebook without chrome os' which is a Nexus 10 (Android but hopefully soon Ubuntu hacked) with a click-on keyboard (with battery) for $350. Thanks!
Nexus 10 has a 9,000 mAh battery, which is also used to compensate for the 2560x1600 resolution. iPad 3/4 has 11,500 mAh and it's pushing 1 million fewer pixels for comparison's sake.
But I agree, Google needs to rectify this in next year's ARM Chromebook. They need to use a battery large enough to hold for 10h (and hopefully maintain, or lower the price). If they use this big.Little chip from Samsung next year, it might be easier to achieve that:
http://androidheadlines.com/2012/11/samsung-8-core-big-littl...
Is RAM upgradeable? does it take SATA HDs?
The A15 seems to be the same weight as the Macbook air. I always thought about buying an MBA, but I feared the hassle of installing Linux on it. Is the A15 my future development machine? All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue.
I am also starting to consider this for development, but I need more assurance that it is a viable option. Does everything mostly work out of the box, or would there be a lot of tinkering / troubleshooting required, e.g. because of the somewhat non-standard nature of running ubuntu on ARM architecture? What about drivers, e.g. for wifi and trackpad?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think people are reporting this relative to expectations rather than absolutely: they assumed it woudl be slower due to the lower cost and lower power consumption but the results defied that expectaion.
$250 is not exceptionally low cost for a netbook. Furthermore the power dissipation of the chromebook under load is only slightly better than a comparable atom system [1]. The idle performance is better, I will give them that. Still, the death of x86 in the face of ARM for performance-sensitive environments (even when power consumption is a factor) has been greatly exaggerated. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/…
Also, this specific Chromebook is higher quality than those netbooks. It's more like an ultrabook in terms of design. Not to mention that it has twice the battery life of those netbooks under normal usage.
I put on a small Debian-based chroot and installed Guacamole[1]*, so I can use my favourite editor and X11 programs within a Chrome tab.
Compiling large C/C++ programs takes a while, but the Go compilers (what I mostly use) work really well. And I can always SSH into beefier machines (Linode/University) if I ever need to.
This replaced a Thinkpad which cost 5 times as much and broke in less than 13 months. So far I'm not missing the Thinkpad. (Well, maybe the 3 button TrackPoint)
What's with the only 6.5 hour battery life? I would buy it if it had >=9. Edit: it's a serious question :) I am really wondering why the Nexus 10 has 9 hours and this 6.5? Please Google, add a 3rd 'chromebook without chrome os' which is a Nexus 10 (Android but hopefully soon Ubuntu hacked) with a click-on keyboard (with battery) for $350. Thanks!
Given the same volume, a tablet has more space for batteries than a laptop. A laptop has to use space for the hinge, keyboard, trackpad, peripheral ports, and display. Worse, you can't fit batteries behind a laptop display without ruining the balance. On the other hand, a tablet is practically a screen with a ton of batteries behind it. Here's some real-world data: The 3rd gen iPad has a 42 watt-hour battery. The 11"…
Intel has been improving their power efficiency dramatically in the past few years. They have the most advanced fabs and arguably the best technology in the semiconductor industry. All the talk is about ARM and low-power computing but Intel is, watt for watt, a serious threat in the high-performance computing market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the same volume, a tablet has more space for batteries than a laptop. A laptop has to use space for the hinge, keyboard, trackpad, peripheral ports, and display. Worse, you can't fit batteries behind a laptop display without ruining the balance. On the other hand, a tablet is practically a screen with a ton of batteries behind it. Here's some real-world data: The 3rd gen iPad has a 42 watt-hour battery. The 11"…
Intel chipsets and processors have gotten very, very good with power management. With reasonable screen brightness and Wifi enabled, my X220 idles at ~8.5W. With a 90Wh battery this gives me ~10 hours on a plane, which is more than I can handle in one go. A tablet TDP (iPad) is about 5W which is 2x better. This is 2X better for a device with smaller screen, no spinning drive, no keyboard, and a much weaker processor.…
The A15 seems to be the same weight as the Macbook air. I always thought about buying an MBA, but I feared the hassle of installing Linux on it. Is the A15 my future development machine? All my development happens in ssh and firefox. So performance is not an issue.
Does that really bear out? I like the idea of a low-powered netbook connecting to a high-powered server for development, but in my (very limited) experience it's a pain.
I have two machines, and old laptop with an AMD RM-70 and a Thinkpad X41 with a Pentium M 1.6 Ghz.
On both machines, using Firefox is a painful experience because the performance is so bad. Using chrome is pretty good.
I've been thinking about buying a newer netbook with better battery life, but the performance of newer low-powered mobile CPUs doesn't seem that much greater than the systems I already have.