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Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

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Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#221

Post by jsolson »

comex wrote: post #216
HappyTypist wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/03/12/mozilla-and-epic-pr...

> In less than 12 months, optimizations have increased the performance of Web applications using asm.js from 40% to within 67% of native, which is still about the current figure, per arewefastyet: http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29&view=breakdown&suite=asm... Not going to cut it for AAA games. Most likely it can be improved significantly with enough work, especially with WebAssembly, but I'll wait until I see it.

Would totally cut it for the casual gamer who plays AAA games, though. Not every gamer who purchases the AAA titles is buying hardware to match them. Many times the question boils down to "is my current hardware good enough"?

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#222

Post by AnAfrican »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #129

My sister works in a semi-developed area of Africa where electricity is unreliable in quality and presence at the best of times, and it's turned out the computer equipment she brought over years ago was pretty ill suited to the conditions and developed problems immediately. She went with all Apple because that was the craze at the time, and most of it was inoperable by the end of the third year. After listening to he…

>if they have good electricity, air conditioning or potable running water

Even in Africa, not having those and having good, stable and cheap internet is a really weird case.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#223

Post by jsolson »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #141
j2kun wrote: post #104

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…

> And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into. I see a lot of excitement about WebAssembly. I al…

Java applets were problematic. They created a distinct runtime with different degrees of freedom and communications mechanisms than the web, generally. It was a security and interop nightmare. Java as a language that can compile down to JS (or WebASM) is fine.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#224

Post by tluyben2 »

ekianjo wrote: post #202
slantyyz wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who started using computers in 1982, I would have to disagree. Computers today are incredibly powerful, and because of that, operating systems and applications have become complex beasts themselves. My first computer only had 4K and a text based interface. As an end user, I only needed to know a handful of commands. Most navigation was done through multiple choice text menus. Even moving into the early 90s…

> Back in the old days, all you had to do was load and run stuff off discretely labeled physical media like a cassette or floppy. You only ran one program at a time. You didn't need to worry about network security, because the only network you could afford consisted of you putting your sneakers on and bringing a disk to another machine. Your computer was turned off with a switch. There was no need for a "shut down" c…

But not than 30 years ago in the ways you mentioned. You had one book and knew all. That even worked with Unix. Then 3.1 and 95 came and stuff got complex. Yes, we are better for it but less complex for the end user is not really true. Those arcane commands (remember we had wordperfect which was keyboard only and everyone was fine with it) were maybe annoying but fast and efficient once you knew them.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#225

Post by azernik »

vilmosi wrote: post #78
azernik wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in my mid-20s, and I'm not comfortable with nothing living on the device :-P

You're not the new generation though

I think it's more that, as a software engineer, I'm not at all representative of my age cohort. Non-techie college friends my age seem split on the Chromebook question, but because the working world has not embraced them I suspect that even the young kids who use them every day now will be forced back into a more fat-client computing system if they enter the workforce in the next few years.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#226

Post by inDigiNeous »

ginkgotree wrote: post #128
j2kun wrote: post #104

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…

Couldn't agree more. It honestly still seems nuts to me that the browser hasn't taken over the whole OS experience. It's clear that locally installed software is going away. But it's happening on a system that was designed decades ago to request a single markup document, and return it in a single response. Obviously, the browser has matured. JavaScript has matured. We now have more protocols to work with than just HT…

Good luck writing anything that requires all the performance you can get, inside a browser.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#227

Post by uola »

magicalist wrote: post #219
uola wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really though. What has happened is that the web has come closer to the desktop not the other way around. It's almost the antithesis to desktop Linux. It's like "the only way we could make Linux mainstream is to ignore anything but the core and run everything in a web browser".

It's a bit silly to argue that adding a graphical shell and a widget toolkit is anywhere near an "antithesis to desktop Linux."

In my book a "graphical shell and a widget toolkit" (and its associated ecosystem) is what makes a "desktop" different from e.g. a video game system. ChromeOS wouldn't de facto be very different for users nor applications developers with a windows kernel and windowing system.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#228

Post by zzkt »

cheez wrote: post #194
spb wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, Chromebooks, when paired with a good cloud IDE like https://c9.io , are excellent for writing code - more so than any "traditional" OS, since the local system is only dedicating resources toward keeping the interface responsive, and not wasting them on background distractions like local search indexing or filesystem defragmentation. Meanwhile, if you accidentally forkbomb a cloud development server, your mu…

If I can try and get to the root of what you're saying: with Chromebook and cloud-based applications, you do not have the resources of one computer, but many and the one closest to you is dedicated ONLY to making sure you have good interactivity. Interesting.

you could think of them as a "client" and "server"

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#229

Post by jalami »

gizmo385 wrote: post #140
jalami wrote: post #123

As I've written earlier, ChromeOS doesn't interest me. It's a tightly locked down linux-y distro as a vector to peddle Google services. It's not complicated, it's very cheap and almost impossible to mess something up because it's so easy to wipe and all your data is on the cloud. That's the appeal and why they're booming in schools, but I find it dangerous for multiple reasons. I wrote at more length about it in yest…

> Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer. I don't necessarily think that an operating system being locked down is equivalent to anti-consumer. For the vast majority of consumers, I think that opening up the full complexity of linux would just be too much hassle and not worth the gains.

I think crippling systems is anti-consumer. Ubuntu is an example of an attempt to mitigate the hassle while allowing the user to control their own device. Is it perfect? No, and they have a very diverse audience to please with one offering, but its a more correct approach. Setting sane defaults and removing confusion in configuration is one thing, but that's not what Google is doing. Google limits software to their repo, makes it difficult, unintuitive and scary to opt-out of things (ctrl-d? insta-wipe ! warning on boot), biases all their software and services with no enable-able alternative and tracks absolutely everything. It's like a tricked out feature phone with a keyboard.

I'm all for standard accounts that have strict privilege boundaries, but with ChromeOS, the consumer can't even decide to be a true administrator. No one's saying everyone needs to be a sysadmin, but a user shouldn't have to enable Developer Mode and deal with usability dark patterns if they want to.

Mozilla used to let the consumer decide, but even they require you to run a separate build in order to install software without their blessing: User freedom is one of their core principles. If developer mode features and privacy opt-outs silently disappear from an entrenched ChromeOS, most wouldn't blink.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#230

Post by rjsw »

curun1r wrote: post #205
thaumasiotes wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into. I see a lot of excitement about WebAssembly. I al…

For one, WebAssembly is designed as a target for many languages. An LLVM backend is in the works, which means being able to write front-end code in one of probably 20-30 languages. I'm personally really hoping we get to the point where I can write my front-end in Rust. Second, Java GUI toolkits all sucked and produced ugly UIs. I know some developers liked Swing and people claim it can be made to look native, but I'v…

Java applets could have been provided with a good binding to the DOM of the containing page, I don't remember anyone asking for this at the time.
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