Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

Re:Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US by pavlov on Friday May 20, 2016 @04:08PM (#11741074)

The idea that nothing of importance lives on the device is a huge paradigm shift ...

Rich vs. thin client is a pendulum that seems to swing about every 10-20 years.

In the mid-'70s, a computer was a big box by IBM or DEC with a number of thin terminals attached. These had enough power to display a screenful of interactive information without having to talk to the server constantly (sort of like an early version of HTML forms).

Then PCs happened, and suddenly you could have your very own device with a slice of the power of that DEC. The client was suddenly so rich but widely available connectivity so slow -- 300-1200 bps modems -- that most people never connected to a server (except for special national networks like France's Minitel).

By the mid-'90s, thin was in again. Sun and Oracle defined a "Network Computer" spec. Apple was planning to build devices for it, but then Jobs had better ideas and the NC never really took off.

So we got ever richer clients in even more personal form factors. The iPhone became the ultimate rich client: in the App Store model, each online service provider is expected to build a native binary and deliver it through Apple. Microsoft has been plotting along similar lines with the Universal Windows platform.

At the same time Google has been trying to push the pendulum back to the thin end. With the new "Instant Apps" model [1], even Android is being turned into a web-like platform of app fragments delivered on the fly. Will be interesting to see how far they can take this -- will the Android runtime be part of Chrome eventually?

[1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-insta...

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Re:Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US by SwellJoe on Friday May 20, 2016 @06:05PM (#11741894)

I don't think it ever actually swung into popular usage, until now, even though a lot of smart nerds wanted it to. So, I don't think a pendulum is the right term for what's happening (or what happened with the NC spec).

I think it's a hill that a lot of people and companies have been pushing computing tech up for many years...now we've reached the top, and we're rolling down the other side. Getting to the top required getting mobile networks "fast enough", systems small enough (because what's the point of being mobile if your system is big and heavy...might as well leave it plugged in at home or at the office), and the web (or something like it) advanced enough to be the platform on which these network apps are built.

If it were a pendulum, we'd see it swing back in 10-20 years. I can't think of any scenario in which that'll happen, even as small/personal devices get more powerful.

Note: I don't know if our destination is a good one. But, momentum and gravity (and hundred billion dollar companies) are definitely pushing us in a pretty clear direction.

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Re:Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US by marssaxman on Friday May 20, 2016 @06:29PM (#11742036)

The momentum comes from the massive overinvestment in network capacity made as a result of the dot-com bubble. Bandwidth doesn't scale like storage or processing capacity do, though, so I predict the current balance in favor of centralization will eventually reverse as the cost of shuttling data back and forth to the center once again comes to outweigh the cost of doing all the heavy lifting at the edges.

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Re:Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US by SwellJoe on Friday May 20, 2016 @07:00PM (#11742219)

Network capacity, at least in most regards, currently dwarfs the expansion that happened back in the late 90s (unless you're talking about some later "dot-com bubble"). I'm not sure how you can argue that we're still trying to fill up bandwidth built in 1999. Sure, there was some build out during the bubble...but, I don't see any reason to think network infrastructure is going to shrink or that costs will increase remarkably.

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Re:Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US by marssaxman on Friday May 20, 2016 @07:21PM (#11742298)

Makes sense that my specifics would be out of date. I'm not arguing that network infrastructure will shrink; I'm observing that the scaling factors for network infrastructure investment are not nearly so favorable as the scaling factors involved in CPU or storage capacity. We can already build hardware with capabilities greatly in excess of our actual needs. When network capacity becomes a bottleneck, it will be much cheaper to take advantage of all that latent capacity at the edge than to invest many billions increasing network capacity, and we'll see yet another pendulum swing away from thin clients toward fat independent hardware devices. Then the market will change and lots of money will flood into network infrastructure, and for a few years the pendulum will swing back again. It's been going back and forth like this for decades.

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Re:Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US by rmrm on Friday May 20, 2016 @09:08PM (#11742667)

Network capacity is a continual bottleneck, and many billions are spent to upgrade the transport network yearly.

Transport signals have gone from 2.5G to 10G to 40G to 100G to 200G per wave, and from 8 waves to 16 waves to 40 waves to 96 waves to 100+ waves per fiber.

The bottleneck has existed for a decade at least, and is invested in to keep pushing it out at the same time all this other stuff is happening.

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Re:Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US by marssaxman on Sunday May 22, 2016 @09:21PM (#11751158)

Hmmm. Interesting that speeds at the edge don't appear to have changed much at all, in years. I didn't think there was much ongoing coverage expansion going on. What's driving the capacity investment? Greater utilization of existing connections? What's using up this capacity?

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Re:Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US by jghn on Friday May 20, 2016 @10:17PM (#11742861)

There's a pendulum, but there's also a long term trend. Each swing towards thin clients seems to go a bit further and the local swing a bit less far.

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Re:Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US by jghn on Friday May 20, 2016 @10:15PM (#11742858)

I came of age during the thin client craze of the 90s and I remember the grey beards then telling all of us whippersnappers that it was just the latest swing of the pendulum. Cut 20 years later and now I'm one of those grey beards.

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