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2015 Chromebook Pixel

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Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#231
Current Chromebooks have a major flaw because they tend to be "locked" by Google.

Without any magical hacks, you won't install Skype. There is no normal file navigation Explorer, and DropBox won't run either.

Of course Drive and Hangouts work.

Price is very good, but until Skype is accepted and better file tools provided, this is once again a turn off.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#232
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it had 256GB and Ubunutu it would be the Linux Macbook we need. A large portion of buyers will almost certainly be trying to run GNU/Linux on it anyway.

"How hard would it be to install Ubuntu" is the first thing I think whenever I see a Chromebook. I never look into it further because I assume they've made it difficult.

It's really not though. There's crouton which makes it trivial to setup a chroot - https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton which is good enough for most users.

If you'd rather blow away ChromeOS and install Ubuntu, it's just a few commands on the command line to boot from USB and install Ubuntu.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#233

Jesus, designing a usable ultrabook must be very difficult. We have one contender from California, but their ideology has them offer just a single USB-C port. Now we get the competitor from Mountain View, who have rightly recognized the need for more than one fucking port when that's how you charge the damn thing, and what do they decide? Oh yeah, we'll top out storage at 64GiB.

The whole point of a chromebook is that the storage is in the cloud. I was surprised they offered so much storage.

> The whole point of a chromebook is that the storage is in the cloud.

The whole point of a Chromebook is that the Chrome browser is the app platform. But among the many big pushes of Chrome to enable browser to be a compelling app platform (and one that eventually moved into web standards) is enabling local storage for browser applications so that they don't need to rely on remote storage for everything.

So it makes sense that it would have less storage than a laptop with a traditional OS, but more storage than you would expect from a "the storage is in the cloud" model.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#234
Google is doing, what a $300 Billion enterprise can do., than a billion people need. Most enterprises of their scale are focused on the later.

I meant, Glass and Chromebook are 'awesome'., but did or does it make sense, theverge repeatedly said, it does not make sense to buy it.

I like the notion of 'web' based OS, but I guess, for time being, that's for our tablets or phones only, a Laptop is multi-purpose machine and will remain so for perhaps ever, I meant its ridiculous to have one laptop for 'web' and other for 'work'., when most of them can do both at once.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, but even at 1GBit over Google Fiber that has still less bandwidth than an actual SSD. And of course the most important part of why you use an SSD in the first place is latency, where cloud storage is significantly slower than 1995 spinning platter hard disks. So even if I accept that the storage is in the cloud , it doesn't make sense since the hardware is clearly not there, but the software isn't eithe…

To be fair, you're not running VMWare on the Pixel either (i don't think?). I'm skeptical that it is even a problem for just about anything you can actually run on the OS. It's a Chromebook afterall, running disk-utilizing programs is not it's design speciality. Sure, you could dump Linux on it - but i'm not sure how many would choose a Pixel over some other highend brands for a Linux machine. I believe the disk is m…

Surely a majority of people buying this won't be running the actual Chromebook system on it? What application can you even run on that system that would use 8GiB of RAM and an i5? And last I checked, you couldn't even run Skype on it, so I mean I just come up pretty much empty for the set of people willing to run Chromebook the OS and buy a 1k machine to do it.

Since Chromebook is Linux under the hood, they'll presumably have the driver situation down. So this makes for a very nice Linux system.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#236

I always see these spec lists and can't help but think that if I replaced the SSD with a much larger one and installed a real OS on it that this would actually be a tolerable machine; though I remain unconvinced that it is worth the price…

The machine looks good,no question. But 16GB ? 32GB ? 64GB SSDs? frankly, it's a no Go for the price ($999). For half the price one can get a better computer. I don't buy the "but you're supposed to be always connected and store files in the cloud" bullshit. I bought a $500 laptop with better specs ,that runs linux without driver and issues and yes, I can surf the web with it.

I'm no fan of Apple but even the latest 13' macbook air at $999 makes way more sense that this product. And yes,it has a browser and Yes you can run Linux on it.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Because my desire is to spend a fortune, only to have to spend another fortune to make it all just work.

because $1299 is a fortune

That's somewhat subjective.

Personally I wouldn't pay more than $300 a machine and consider $1299 to be pretty extortionate amounts of cash considering the rate of depreciation.

Hey everyone I just worked 2x the time to pay for something shiny with no productivity gain!

(I use a shitty old X201 with 4Gb RAM and an SSD from eBay connected to a monitor I skip dived because it was 5:4 ratio)

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. Because my desire is to spend a fortune, only to have to spend another fortune to make it all just work.

because $1299 is a fortune

I agree, it isn't a fortune, but it isn't cheap either. The people who complain about the price can't/don't want to spend the money to buy a high end device, but they want a high end device.

The people who wine about the costs of going high end (MacBook , Watch, whatever) aren't part of Apple's target demographic. Apple wants to (and always has) sell well made devices to people who don't want cheap, and aren't afraid to pay for it.

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#239

Pretty neat. And caveat the port issue[1] pretty nice. I wonder what the battery life is like with Linux installed (probably not 12 hours :-) Now if they added a wireless charging option so that when I set it upon my desk it was powered/charging wirelessly that would be pretty neat. I'm amazed as how closely it tracks the macbook 13. They could be twins. [1] The whole one port to rule them all which is fine except th…

Well, it does come with Linux on it...

Re: 2015 Chromebook Pixel

#240

I'm not sure why this is better than the cheapest macbook air?Similar battery life, similar processor. 4gb more memory, smaller hard drive. And the cheapest pixel is $100 more. What do I get for that $100? For me the downsides are: can only use apps from the chrome web store, no unix command line (maybe it exists and I don't know?). I'm really happy someone is trying to compete, but not sure why I would buy this.

This is Retina, Macbook Air is not.

The new MacBook is retina, no?
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