Android has arguably more high-performance, graphics-heavy and touch-enabled apps, and has the toolchains to compile more sophisticated applications (IDEs, etc).
[1]: https://plus.google.com/100132233764003563318/posts/exCKa13F...
[2]: https://plus.google.com/+PaulWilcox/posts/23QtTfiVrtk
Also, Google has a weird ironic naming paradigm. First is Chrome which is named as such because they want to minimize the browser's chrome (tab bar, menus, buttons, etc.), and now is the Pixel which has a HiDPI display so people kind of forget the pixel. It would probably be a bad idea to call their self-driving car Crash though.
Speak to any Googler and you'll hear about the Chrome/Android divide. It's a pretty big issue and possibly Google's biggest weakness.
JS: And this also gets at another issue. I know that Sergey made some comments that were widely reported about a future merging of Android and Chrome OS, and to me this seems more like a statement of the obvious. In the sense that, once the hardware is full-featured enough to support all the things that you have on Chrome OS, then why do you need something as stripped-down as Android.
MP: Yeah, it's unclear. We get a lot of questions like this, and the truth is, I don't know the answer. We're so focused on shipping release one right now, we spend less time than the outside world speculating about what we're going to do next... how will we integrate this with Android... how will we do any number of things like that. -- http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/01/chrome-os-interview-...
The interview as a whole shows where Google's head was at regarding Chrome OS just a week before the iPad was announced, which is itself fascinating.
I think the evidence says it all. Three years later and Chrome & Android are no closer to a merger.
There is also nothing stopping you from porting your favorite development tools to NaCl. This is something I'm planning to look into in the near future.
they were already using Google Docs and are fine with their crappy old netbook
Also, Google Docs looks really nice on a Macbook's retina display; significantly nicer than on a regular display. If the Pixel renders it the same way, it is a nicer experience.
Your average end-user is going to be pretty disappointed when they find out that all they can do with their expensive laptop is browse the internet.
It seems like the best use of this of this might be to run Linux, but if you accept a slightly lower resolution, you can get a pretty decent Thinkpad or Envy that has a lot more flexibility.
Chrome (both the browser and ChromeOS) have always been about making it so that "browser" and "dumb terminal" aren't at all the same thing. Certainly, I think its reasonable to say that its still at the point where, for many power users, it isn't suitable as a replacement for a traditional desktop OS.
But then, this is clearly aimed at early adopters that are more heavily into web-based tools than is generally the case, and who value a low-configuration means of getting to those tools.
Yes, the resolution is great. But why would someone spend 1300 bucks on something that has great resolution just so they can ssh into something else? $500 maybe.
Okay, fuck HN.
The real answer is: depends on what $1000 means to you.
We have an idea what $1000 means to most people
I just realized this was really my only major complaint with ChromeOS and I now desire one.
Writing the code is only half the story. You also need to test that code and that means running the code on a target machine similar to your customer.
So unless you customer is also using a Chromebook this is going to make the testing much harder.
Right. And unless you are writing desktop software, that most likely means running it on a commodity physical or virtual servers, which aren't going to be your dev workstation.
For user-facing web software (as opposed to pure web services), ideal UI testing means having a wide variety of hardware/OS/browser combinations available for testing, but none of that needs to be your development workstation, either.
So neither of thos are strokes against using a Chromebook for development.
> There is also nothing stopping you from porting your favorite development tools to NaCl.
> If the Pixel renders it the same way, it is a nicer experience.
Once I got a linode server set up I stopped worrying about not having my dev env. With persistent 3G I was actually able to SSH in and get work in settings I never would have considered previously.
The obvious thing that was missing from the chromebook experience was a core set of native app. 1password, skype, spotify, and a few others haven't quite made it to a web app yet. However, most of these apps have a native client ready to go for iOS. So between the chromebook and iPad mini I felt like I had everything I needed to be productive.
Ultimately, I simply wanted a nicer machine to work on day to day. Chrome OS is a real pleasure to use (I like it more than modern OS X in some ways!), but the hardware on my Samsung laptop just felt, well...cheap. This new machine fits that sweet spot really nicely. I could see myself considering to purchase this machine as a dev laptop if I hadn't just bought a new macbook pro.
If you want to say it's "better," I'd ask "to what end?" I personally really like the security model of ChromeOS and having working 3G drivers was a huge benefit when I was experimenting with this setup. I love having a secure client I can trust to connect to sanctioned dev environments on. It's much harder for me to vet that my ubuntu rig hasn't been root-kitted vs. trusting the block-level cryptographic hashing on ChromeOS.
I think this is probably where most people would call me a tin-foil hat weirdo, and I wouldn't disagree. This might be just a fun exercise to think about right now. However, I think it's an increasingly important factor in considering personal computing setups and it definitely played into my choice of platform on the ChromeBook. Plus, it's also just plain cool to see how much mileage you can get out of just chrome + ssh!
But as a $250 web machine with 10h of battery life? Sure.
with the advent of technologies like WebGL a lot of apps can be moved into the browser. Including photo editing and 3D gaming.
If such apps are running in a browser, as non native code, this would call for good hardware specs. especially with such high resolutions.
seems reasonable to me.
Web-based IDEs and 3D games exist that can be used with this (photo editors, too, though not Photoshop.)
Depends what they are coding; developers working with PaaS platforms using one of the many cloud IDEs can certainly use it.
> Writers are not gonna migrate from Word to something like this, because either they were already using Google Docs and are fine with their crappy old netbook, or they like Word and are gonna stay with it, because writing is still just plain better in MS land.
If they are using Google Docs on an existing laptop/netbook, well, eventually its going to need replaced, and if that's their main use, ChromeOS presents a lot less distraction than traditional desktop OS's for that use role.
There needs to be a balance. If I can't use my IDE on a chromebook, that obviously won't work. But if I can have access to my tools locally that manage remote service and data -- I'm golden.
How many breathless stories have been linked here about dudes in Oregon pedaling their mountain bike out into the forest and setting up their iPad 3 and Zagg keyboard, and using their LTE connection to do remote dev? Same thing for the Chromebook.
It may work if you use SSH, as others have mentioned, but that still restricts your use case and that's not what you implied at first.
That said, yes, brackets is immature, but fairly brightly points to a future where a browser OS like ChromeOS is more than sufficient for a really wide variety of use-cases.
> I've never really understood being cheap with something that you're going to look at and touch 6-10 hours a day for 3-4 years, on average.
For simple image editing, I just use pixlr.com. If I really needed advanced features from photoshop (or gimp), I can A) remote connect to a desktop or B) boot to ubuntu from a flash drive.
If you need Visual Studio and don't have access to a desktop computer you can remote connect to, then yes, don't buy a chromebook.
Or of course if you are developing native iphone/ipad apps (i.e., not phonegap, etc.) and don't have access to a mac computer, then yes, of course, get a macbook instead of a chromebook.
If you don't like chrome OS then you can install ubuntu or whatever. The lack of local storage space would be a pain, though, I do admit.
(edit: competes in terms of screen resolution... 4GB RAM and an i5 is not as good as 8-16GB RAM and an i7 of course)
And if you're the kind of writer that doesn't need it, you probably already are using docs, on your $300 netbook, and you really don't care. This isn't going to improve your life in any way, because frankly, a computer from 1995 would be all you need for writing. I'd say earlier, but you at least need a half-decent print preview.
The long-term strategy, which they announced years ago, is to converge the two platforms. (Its been obvious for some time that, in more detail, Android was the near-term comparatively low-risk [for Google] option, and ChromeOS was the long-term, higher-risk option.)
"We're pushing computing forward. It'll definitely make the
ecosystem rethink touch," Pichai said. "I think people will
take the first step toward building tablets with this." [1]
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57570520-93/googles-chromeb...
What power user lives completely in the cloud?
* Coders obviously can't use this machine.
* Designers need photoshop or other non-web apps.
* Writers are not gonna migrate from Word to something like this, because either they were already using Google Docs and are fine with their crappy old netbook, or they like Word and are gonna stay with it, because writing is still just plain better in MS land.
* Video editors obviously need real apps
* Social media experts will just continue to use their iPad3 or Nexus 7/10
* Gamers can't go without DirectX seriously
What power users are they talking about?