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 either. I can't tell VMWare to use Google Drive for storage. It's a propietary data-dump, not an actual drive.

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 mainly just used as a cache, for web apps (music/etc). Just about everything is stored in the "cloud".

(I own a first generation Chromebook, but things may have changed)

>but i'm not sure how many would choose a Pixel over some other highend brands for a Linux machine.

I'm curious to know what other ultrabooks make great hardware for a linux laptop. Do you know a few?

I'm a huge fan of the Lenovo X1 Carbon. Despite their stupid moves regarding preloaded software, it's tough to beat a Thinkpad for Linux support.

Even better than the Linux support though is their warranty support. For under $100 you can get a year of accidental damage protection with onsite service -- Not long ago I knocked my X230 off a desk, cracking the LCD. Lenovo sent an IBM tech out the next day with an LCD, who then installed it in my home office.

Earlier today, I died a little when I discovered that they no longer sell the Thinkpad t430u. Wonderful machine.

Yea, i'm heavily debating a highend Thinkpad as a replacement for my Macbook Pro.

Mostly, i want Macbook Pro "quality", in a system that has good Linux support - mainly for containers, i'm sick of running a Linux VM on my OSX machine.

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.

> Surely a majority of people buying this won't be running the actual Chromebook system on it?

"Chromebook" is the hardware device. ChromeOS is the operating system.

> What application can you even run on that system that would use 8GiB of RAM and an i5?

Is there an upper limit to the RAM or CPU a browser-based application can use?

Sure, many of the people buying this won't be running ChromeOS.. but then they shouldn't really be complaining that it doesn't fit their needs. A Chromebook is not a general purpose device, it was specifically designed for a narrow use case, ChromeOS. The fact that you can do something else with it, does not mean it was designed for that.

I'm not going to buy a vehicle designed for hauling freight, and complain that it isn't sporty enough. Which, in my opinion, is what complaining about the lack of storage in a "Webbook" is like. You're buying a device, specifically tailored and designed for people who are using a web based operating system. It doesn't even let you install things by default, outside of web apps.

I just bought more RAM for my PC because the 4GB I had wasn't enough for all the tabs I keep open in Chrome. Every time I switch to a tab that wasn't open for a while it would swap like mad and become unresponsive.

> couldn't even run Skype on it

Hangouts?

... would be fine until I want to talk to my mother, who uses Skype. And then it would feel strangely limiting to not be able to do that on my $999 computer.

Whoops, I misread the post above and thought they were using Skype/video chat as an example of a computationally intensive application. My bad!

can you use VMWare on a chromebook?

The newer versions of VMware are html based instead of using the thick client. Managing them and accessing the console should work in theory. Also the Citrix receiver and Remote Desktop clients both work well on the newer chromebooks. If you mean running vms I would consider a more powerful machine with more ram and a supported operating system.

Too bad that VMWare still hasn't upgraded their VMWare Integration plugin to use the new plugin architecture for Chrome, and that Adobe no longer makes Flash for Linux because right now the only way I can manage my VMWare/vCenter is using the Freshplayerplugin that wraps the Pepper Flash version that comes bundled with Chrome so that I can have the VMWare integration plugin function so that I can upload/download OVF's.

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Suffice to say, the newer versions of VMWare are not HTML based. It's a full on Flash application.

I have a Dell XPS13 running Ubuntu and I use the vSphere Web Client in Chrome to manage our infrastructure.

Do you have the VMWare Client Integration plugin? So that you can upload/download OVF files? So that you can browse the datastore and download files?

I apologize I read that last line right after I hit reply. I still cannot transfer files. I use it to manage the existing FreeBSD\Windows\Linux boxes that we currently have and have a bunch of templates that I use already.

Inside a chroot - yes. See https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

> 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.

The typical usage of local storage for webapps is as a cache. That's different in practice from the traditional desktop pattern of installing apps.

It seems like the first models where initially intended to be more of a thin client type deal, but that doesn't seem to be the case with this model (given that it can go up to an i7 with 16gb of RAM). The disk space is disappointing mark on an otherwise excellent ultrabook report card.

In a world where cable companies monopolize broadband Internet and cell phone carriers charge for data by the megabyte, I'm pretty sure I don't want to rely solely on the cloud.

In a world, where I achieved today 50-200 kbps connection via ipsec to my company I don't want to rely on network connection either.

I upgraded my acer c720p chromebook to 120GB NGFF drive so I'd have more space for my debian chroot. The chromeos is nice. But I really depend on running linux (debian).