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The Chromebook Pixel

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Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#341

Post by Zak »

j-b wrote: post #231
mtgx wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. ChromeOS is not for such powerful machines, because the OS itself is not powerful. So ChromeOS with a $1000 machine is far from a perfect match (at least it isn't yet, maybe 5-10 years from now). But right now ChromeOS is and should be for light web machines. And I've said it many times before. There's absolutely no reason for Chromebooks to use x86 chips. I've said Google will almost surely mess up the pric…

Why pay $1,299 for a thin client OS even if it's running thick client hardware? I can run a browser and so much more in a macbook air or thinkpad in the same price range.

This has a far better screen than either of those objectively and a more preferable aspect ratio for many of us subjectively. Installing arbitrary Linux distributions on Chromebooks has been trivial in the past and almost certainly remains so with this one. Many people here would install their Linux distribution of choice on whatever laptop they bought anyway, so the shipping OS is a non-issue.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#342

Post by Kerrick »

rayiner wrote: post #311
pyoung wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you also have ~20 tabs open in your browser, and are streaming music etc... I am doing a thin client setup of sorts, and by the end of the day things start slowing down quite a bit. I do agree that $1300 is too much, at that price range you might as well get a mac. If it was 600-800 i'd probably jump on it. However, I think the curve ball here is the touch screen. I'd be willing to bet that Google's strategy f…

> I'd be willing to bet that Google's strategy for this laptop is to do a smaller production run, and get these in the hands of tech/programmer types If that's the case, pull an Apple and ship great dev tools on the installation disk. As far as I can tell, there are no top-notch Chrome OS development tools, just various ways to remote into a real machine to do that work.

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

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#343

Post by kunai »

kunai wrote: post #326
dman wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To encourage a world where a) companies build desirable hardware b) companies realise having a good screen is a feature c) companies build screens with more code friendly aspect ratios

> companies build screens with more code friendly aspect ratios Let's hope Lenovo takes a look at this. I'd love a Thinkpad with a high-res screen, 3:2 display, and of course, the venerable TrackPoint and keyboard. Touchscreen is a nice novelty feature but really isn't required.

> I'll take any steps in the direction of square as positive

If someone proposes a Kickstarter project for a mobile developer workstation with a solid design, 4:3 high-res screen, pointing stick, and great keyboard, I'll be the first to hop on.

Or maybe I should go ahead and make that Kickstarter project a reality instead of waiting for someone to.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#344

Post by Kerrick »

cube13 wrote: post #234
Kerrick wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people already do this with the $250 Chromebook, and even iPad. The $1,299 isn't for the 32GB SSD. It's for the 239ppi 2:3 multitouch Gorilla Glass display. It's for the 4GB of RAM. It's for the dual core Intel i5. It's for the impressively made aluminum chassis. It's for the 1TB of cloud storage. It's for everything a high-end cloud device should be.

But the OS is cloud based, so you don't need the processor power or the RAM. That's the entire point of ChromeOS.

You do for things like WebGL, client-heavy web apps, and other wonderful upcoming web technologies. The point is that this laptop should last you until it physically wears out, not until it becomes obsolete.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#345

Post by micro_cam »

ConstantineXVI wrote: post #87
commandar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And yet ChromeOS can't do any of these things. Am I just imagining all the posts I've seen on HN from people talking about being extremely happy using Chromebooks as development platforms?

Either after flipping the dev-mode switch and running a chroot or such (thus being outside CrOS's use case), or using it entirely as a thin client (which doesn't need this kind of horsepower).

I really hope that running a chroot or vm becomes a fully supported part of chrome os along with an x server. Working with a crouton ubuntu chroot on my (free) chromebox feels a lot like using OS X circa 10.3 or so and I would consider using it as my full time dev box if autoupdate worked in dev mode. I think i would actually prefer it to modern os x if I could tweak some keyboard shortcuts and run an x sever (even an annoying one like apples) mixed in with aura instead of having to switch back and forth.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#346

Post by threedaymonk »

yuxt wrote: post #77
recoiledsnake wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it is purely amazing the specs for that price. The display specs are amazing, but storage is a paltry 32GB so I guess it's compensated there.

They also provide "One terabyte of Google Drive cloud storage, free for 3 years"

I just calculated that I'd have to saturate my (normal-for-UK) ADSL uplink for 7 months to upload a terabyte.

I envy anyone who can actually make use of that.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#347

Post by kunai »

vibrunazo wrote: post #262
Teckla wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely no reason for Chromebooks to use x86 chips. What about people that prefer trading some battery life for some performance?

It's an i5 processor, 2 cores at 1.8ghz. New generation arm processors, for example the tegra 4, is quad core at 1.9ghz. Wouldn't it be both more powerful and have more battery life, if it had waited for the tegra 4? Or am I missing something?

You are missing something. 2 things, actually.

Cache and instruction set.

Intel is still more powerful than ARM because of its instruction set.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#348

Post by stanleydrew »

colin_jack wrote: post #218
raingrove wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Action.IO... Cloud9... Koding...

I spent some time with cloud9 convincing myself it was usable and bought a chromebook only to find that aswell as chromeos being a massive let down c9 ran like a dog on it. Main thing is it was ridiculously slow, the same actions taking noticably long on the chromebook compare to my laptop.

It's interesting to see all the people on here saying that there's no point to having a beefier machine to "just browse the web" and then see your comment which would appear to indicate that there is a need for more performant web-browsing devices.

How much did you pay for your laptop?

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#349

Post by nbouscal »

chris_mahan wrote: post #229
Kerrick wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome has a wonderful SSH client [0], and with a $5/mo Digital Ocean [1] (or other [2]) VPS for all your UNIX work, it's a perfectly capable dev machine. [0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec... [1]: https://www.digitalocean.com/ [2]: http://www.lowendbox.com/

I got a cr-48 in november 2010. The new chromeOS remaps ctrl-o to "open window" even when in crosh, so you can't save files in nano or pico. I stopped using it altogether. It's gathering dust.

I'm still using mine (got it December 2010), but I replaced the ChromeOS with a Linux. It actually works great, especially for a free laptop that's over two years old. I agree that the last several updates to ChromeOS made things worse rather than better, though.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel

#350

Post by steve-howard »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #194
mtgx wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. ChromeOS is not for such powerful machines, because the OS itself is not powerful. So ChromeOS with a $1000 machine is far from a perfect match (at least it isn't yet, maybe 5-10 years from now). But right now ChromeOS is and should be for light web machines. And I've said it many times before. There's absolutely no reason for Chromebooks to use x86 chips. I've said Google will almost surely mess up the pric…

The Chromebook with the best battery life is the Atom-based Samsung Series 5.

I own a Series 5 chromebook. It's hands down the worst machine I've ever owned. I really wanted to like it, too. My issue is that I tried to use it for stuff like reddit, youtube, and whatnot, and because it has no swap space it would just kill background tabs once I had more than 3 or so open. Basically it's a machine built for browsing the web, but because of the way I (and possibly others) use the web it's not useful for that purpose.
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