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The Chromebook Pixel

chrome.blogspot.com

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Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#431

Post by dudusmaximus »

scholia wrote: post #322
javajosh wrote: post #58

There are only three meaningful things you can do with a computer with specs like this: development, design, or gaming. And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things. Perhaps this is a vanity product for the wealthy. But wealthy people are going to just surf the web on an iPad. I really don't get this product.

Maybe it's designed for Google employees. If so, we may not know why they wanted that spec, and the price doesn't matter...

I agree. Dogfooding whilst ensuring their productivity won't suffer. Something to replace all those MacBookPros being used at Google ..

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#432

Post by reissbaker »

rayiner wrote: post #354
Kerrick wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome Developer Tools, built into Chrome and Chrome OS really are top-notch Chrome OS development tools... because everything runs in Chrome.

They're toys compared to Visual Studio or XCode (or Emacs).

Pretty sure Square disagrees, and they know what they're talking about when it comes to XCode. See PonyDebugger, a tool they wrote to pipe iOS apps' network connections and debug information through Chrome to take advantage of the developer tools: https://github.com/square/PonyDebugger

Now, you'd never write code in the Chrome Developer Tools (except maybe the occasional one-liner in the REPL). But the Chrome Developer Tools are great — best in class even — for profiling, visualizing, and debugging.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#434

Post by nwh »

Evbn wrote: post #415
nwh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would cost me $20,000 to transfer that amount of data over 3G, and almost ten times that on another common carrier. The amount of "cloud" storage is irrelevant in most countries.

WiFi....

An even more unfriendly prospect: at a typical Australian upload speed of 100kB/s, it would take 2982 hours (124.5 days) to upload enough data to fill the drive. At this point, most people would have given up and bought a laptop with a decent amount of storage.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#435

Post by reissbaker »

rayiner wrote: post #310
zmmmmm wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it might work reverse to this. You don't buy your think client and then figure out how to live with it. Rather, Google is betting that in the future people will be using thin clients and cloud services because of all the other reasons they are attractive. Once you've already decided you want to live in the cloud, then your question becomes, what is the best possible device I could buy for doing that? And that…

Thin client, thick client, cloud, local, etc, these are all only relevant to technical people. Focus on use-cases. What does the Pixel let you do that a Macbook Pro does not? Have access to all your documents from anywhere (over internet connections of various levels of unreliability?) No, because you can do all that on a Macbook Pro. Does taking away the ability to do things locally improve the user experience in so…

> Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?

None of the ones who need to write documents and emails, or edit spreadsheets.

For spreadsheets, it's still less than perfect because Google Spreadsheets are still worse than Excel wrt scripting and managing large datasets. But security, ease of use, and lower maintenance burden might make up for it depending on what your needs are. For my parents, this would be perfect.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#436

Post by bound008 »

Why isn't there 8gb of ram? Even as a die hard apple user I still can't see why they didn't try and beat apple on such a simple and clear specification that when you spend all day in a web browser will help with how fast the device seems.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#439

Post by jahmed »

zmmmmm wrote: post #375
rayiner wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A chromebook has all the physical features of a high end professional laptop, but is 100% cloud based, and thus can be used as a real computer for real tasks. Except it can't. There is a theoretical possible future in which everyone has 40 mbps unmetered LTE and powerful apps exist in web form, but if anything the trend has been the opposite in recent years (carriers eliminating unlimited data plans, apps moving ba…

Yep, I completely agree - I'm hugely sceptical about whether this future where we can all rely on high speed network access 100% of the time will ever arrive. But I don't think Google is - they are betting this is coming. And in the meantime they are trying to provide just enough local state (HTML5 style) to get you by during the outages.

Why wouldn't that future come? Considering Phase I of the GSM specifications was only published in 1990 we've gone pretty far.

This is an aspirational device. They should give a few away in Kansas city. Im sure it would be beautiful with Google fiber.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#440

Post by mrb »

cricketer wrote: post #414
mrb wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody knows there is no industry standard to measure battery life (basically which workload to run when measuring it). For example Anandtech measured the MacBook Air 13" as having a battery life varying between 3 and 7.52 hours depending on the workload: http://www.anandtech.com/print/6063 So my point is that Google would not specifically have the goal of underestimating battery life, but just that it is almost g…

The battery life testing mechanism for Chrome OS is documented here: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/testing/power-testing .

Thank you, this confirms what I suspected. Google makes the laptop stream music and play full screen video for some amount of time, whereas Apple makes it only browse wirelessly ("up to X hours wireless web").
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