The middle class in first world countries, maybe. Try spending some time in the developing world. Lower cost of living means that "middle income" families can live comfortably on less income. But the costs of large capital goods, e.g. computers and cars, is not lower.

Imagine your average laptop cost $5k - $15k. Would you consider it a big deal if you could get a decent <$1k laptop? That's the equivalent situation.

An awful lot of people pluck down premium-level bucks for iOS, which is even more neutered than ChromeOS. Consumers have spoken, they do not care.

Consumers do care, they just care about different things that some of us do.

I liken it to techies running out and buying a Tesla. You can't put your own turbo on it, you can't do much to improve the performance or customize it, you can't repair the engine in your garage, you can't drop in a new transmission when yours goes out, and it's not a manual transmission, so you're giving up a lot of control in driving it.

That's what an automotive-minded person might believe. Why would you buy an electric car that you can't control when you could have a 1989 Volkwagen Golf getting 30mpg that would last you forever with just a little bit of maintenance? You would make that choice because you don't want to have the responsibility of doing something that makes the car unreliable or unsafe. You don't have the knowledge or the tools to fix it when it does. And you can't be late for work, or fail to pick up your daughter from school because your car wouldn't start. So even though you could get a car perfectly tailored to you and controlled by you for just $5,000, you buy a $60,000 electric car knowing that there's hardly any moving parts, so all you need to do is turn the car on and put your foot down and it will work. You plug it in when you get home, and unplug it when you leave for work. That's all you need to know.

That's how I liken the debate between Android and iOS, or Linux and Windows. People say to me "look at all the customization I can do!" and all I see is a maintenance nightmare. I use Linux at work because that's what it's best at. When I get home, I'm playing video games on my Windows desktop. On the weekends, I'm driving down two-track roads in my custom-built 1998 Toyota 4Runner, but my daily driver is a Fiat 500. When I'm playing around with developing apps, I'll sideload them onto my Nexus 4. But when someone calls my phone number, it rings to my iPhone, which I know will always ring no matter what software I manage to install.

As a consumer, it's not that I don't care. It's that I don't even want it. I know it's there. I know it's cheaper and I know it's more powerful and I know it can be customized. But none of those things are at the top of my list. Reliability, compatibility, and simplicity are my three biggest requirements.

>I liken it to techies running out and buying a Tesla. You can't put your own turbo on it, you can't do much to improve the performance or customize it, you can't repair the engine in your garage, you can't drop in a new transmission when yours goes out, and it's not a manual transmission, so you're giving up a lot of control in driving it.

That is an interesting analogy, but it's pretty misleading. Tesla happens to be locked down but not because it's electric. It doesn't need a turbo, that's like being upset you can't put a new zip disk in your SSD. The engines are fixed ratio, that's a more direct control than using a gear box. Electric cars have either simpler transmissions, or no transmissions at all. In general that means easier replacement, or not having to replace anything, surely a positive, right?

Electric cars are capable of being simpler and more alteration-friendly than ICEs. They just cost more.

Well obviously turbo is just an example. Analogies can only ever approximate their subject, they can never be perfect. The idea is, that's the antithesis of what the guy down at your local garage might look for. It's not terribly moddable, you have less control over the inner workings, it's really expensive, the manufacturer holds tight control over the software, and yours is exactly the same as the one next to it. Those are all the criticisms aimed at iOS when people are saying they like Android better.

What I'm saying is it's not that customers don't understand these points, it's that these points are exactly why some customers don't choose a more open system.

But what I'm saying is that the tight control specifically from Tesla is totally unrelated to it being electric. Nothing stops electric vehicles from being great for modding. Tesla is a lot like Apple but it's not at all about the engine.

And some of the androids are even more expensive than iPhones...

People mod Teslas. You can't mod the transmission because it basically doesn't have one. But you can write awesome html5 apps for the 17" touchscreen.

This is not a particularly insightful comment.

The implicit context for the comment you're replying to, made explicit, is clearly "Consumers have spoken, they do not care [about whether their devices have a 'real' OS or not]." Given that this is the case, your rebuttal is a fairly empty one. It's essentially in the same realm as tautological-ish, no-impact statements, as far its role in this discussion goes...

> iOS, which is even more neutered than ChromeOS

I disagree, developers can develop native apps for iOS even if they need to go through the App Store. Only crippled web apps are allowed on Chrome OS and only Google can develop really native apps.

Google publishes instructions on how to unlock the boot loader and install whatever you want. Apple does not.

Really, we're in a day and age where most people can do their daily activities on the web.

The usual "word processing, research, facebook" student load, for instance? A dedicated physical machine powerful enough to run even MS Word locally is a waste of money in this instance.

Access to the global information network and ability to use things on it is step 0 in getting people into the modern era. All that other stuff that you get from a "real OS" is a step above that.

Not everyone lives in a first-world country where ubiquitous internet access via wifi hotspots has been implemented, and not everyone can afford a 3G plan.

I rarely see working (as in usable, encrypted and not total rip-offs) hotspots in Germany. Anywhere.

Not in Cologne (~1 million) nor Dortmund/Bochum (part of the 'Ruhrgebiet' metropolitan area, which Wikipedia estimates includes about 12 million people).

Guess not a first-world country?

We're probably on the same side: I would NEVER go for a Chromebook. Always online is stupid. Mobile sucks on trains here, so forget about data on the move. Hotspots don't exist. There are still lots of places that I visit that have little to no usable data connectivity.

I have no clue what the Chromebook is for, but it would be a giant failure in my circles and my environment.

In the third world, internet access is more common than you think... My wife's family gets more reliable internet and wireless coverage than they do electricity or plumbing. When I went down there, you could go to a textile shop or open air market and I'd pick up open WiFi hotspots..m

Not to mention that "first-world country where ubiquitous internet access via wifi hotspots has been implemented" doesn't particularly describe, say, the US very well. The picture painted to try to make these contrasts tends to itself stand in contrast to the picture that is real life.

Not that the over-arching sentiment of "you shouldn't take the existence of an always-available network connection for granted" is a bad one. It's just that saying, basically, "These devices aren't suitable everywhere; consider market segments that may be less mature than the big, contemporary Western one you're most familiar with, for example" is a little bit of a weird and not terribly convincing way to express it.

In support of this, in my SO's city in Brazil there's many more public wifi places than anywhere in the Netherlands.

And this is probably not the device for them.

The whole point of a netbook (which is really what a Chromebook is, with the tainted name dropped) is something that has most of its functionality on the web rather than a local device.

Never understood why "netbook" became a bad word. I loved mine; it was sturdy and simple and cheap and I never worried about throwing it in a bag and taking it wherever I was going. My mindset was "so what if it gets trashed, it only cost $250, I'll buy another one!" - but in fact my one netbook lasted five years, and by then the category had disappeared. That one Eee pc outlasted two macbooks!

I think part of it was that there were so many horribly specced Windows devices sold. As in, the specs were not good enough to handle the OS. 2GB, a single core first gen Atom, and a 5200RPM drive is painful to use even Windows 7 on.

Had one of those machines for work. Even after a fresh install, the lag was positively infuriating.

Ah, that makes sense. My Eee came with an SSD, and I installed Linux the day it arrived. I can see how it would have been a different experience with Windows and old-school hard drives.

It honestly wasn't awful. I used an MSI Wind U100 for several years - I actually used it for school until June last year. I gradually transitioned OS's - WinXP, OSX, then Ubuntu 11.04. Ran all of them like a champ, video playback was the only sticking point.

Don't bother, this thread is totally astroturfed by paid googlers. What you can read here is just insane. I can't believe HN is alllowing this. This product is crap,but boy they are selling it hard here.

I too was surprised by how positive some of the comments were. Microsoft's Surface tablet seems widely panned here (unless I am looking at the wrong comments) but if Microsoft had released a Chromebook, everyone would have said "HAHA! What a piece of junk! Who'd buy that???"

When Apple released the MacBook the other week, everyone had the same reaction ("Only one port? Can't plug in a USB stick and the power adapter at the same time? It'd STOOOPID").

But, when Google releases an UNDERPOWERED netbook with abysmal 1990s screen resolution, less storage than a USB stick and that only fully works when you're on a network, it's widely praised. I don't understand it!

In the 1980s with the microcomputer boom, if you'd have told all those kids using BBC Micros at their school that they could only use their computer and the Interword ROM whilst connected to the telephone system, they'd have thought you were stupid.

Yet, essentially this is what Chrome OS offers you. You can upload all your data (as if uploading your 4GB videos to "the cloud" is an enjoyable experience), and then view it periodically when you have a network connection.

I know we normally DO have network connections but the invention of microcomputers was meant to DO AWAY with the need for mainframes, not turn our local powerful microcomputers into dumb terminals for remote corporate-controlled mainframes. If you'd proposed such a solution 20 years ago, they'd have thought you were insane.

I've never understood this argument.

You need a connection for web-based use-cases.

You don't need a connection for non web-based use-cases (document editing, etc works offline).

The same is true of any OS.

But it's true that with ChromeOS the entire usability of the product is massively different without Internet access. All of the "apps" don't work as well without an Internet connection. This doesn't happen with an ordinary machine (if you open Word whilst offline, it isn't crippled).

I think storing all of your data online is foolish, basically as it means that offline you're scuppered.

I've never had a chromebook. How bad is it? What if I just want to browse the web and watch hulu, netflix, and youtube?

I have a cheap Samsung Chromebook ($250 in 2013). I've never had a problem browsing with 10+ tabs open and watching hulu at the same time.

It is not going to run Visual Studio of course, but it is quite capable for browsing/videos/word processing/etc.

If you have a windows desktop on your lan, using RDP via the chromebook does okay in a pinch... when I used mine, I'd typically have several SSH windows, and an RDP connection open. Worked really well for me. Though I really wanted VPN, and the ability to run VMs, so broke down and bought a new MBP (my prior one was stolen).

I have a aver c670 and was 159 and I love it. Would love to get a chrome bit instead of the stupid chromecast

How usable/practical is it without a WiFi connection?

It's basically just a web browser with some tweaks for convenient offline Google Docs. You can unlock a full shell and download some decent editors (Caret is one that I've used), if you want to do JS or Python development. Unfortunately the third-party package manager ("chromebrew") does not have a very robust offering, so you're pretty limited in what you're able to do. You can try building binaries yourself but you'll need to build your toolchain as well.

What do you want to do offline? You can install chrome and turn off your internet connection today and find out how well it works for you.

Browse https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps?_feature=of... to get a list of apps that are available that work offline.

Or just take your chrome book to china where all Google apps are blocked...

I also have a cheap, late 2012 Samsung Chromebook with an ARM processor and 2GB RAM, the kind the reviewers like to get down on as horribly underpowered. But over time updates have improved the performance and at this point it's really fine.

And yes, Netflix, YouTube etc., no problem.

They're like fairly-reliable burner laptops. They handle most of the day-to-day things you would ever need a laptop for, but don't leave you worrying that much about price if it were stolen or damaged.

Which is probably why they're so popular with schools. I no longer own one but when I did it was my go to for email and basic web stuff.

If all you need is a web browser its amazing.

I have an ARM Samsung and I really like it; great battery life and runs Linux with Crouton. ChromeOS is fine for browing and most document writing I do. My wife wrote a few books on it in Google docs. No problem...

It isn't. Even the first ones ran at a decent clip.

Yes, it makes me wonder how many people buy a Chromebook and state "never again!". It's like being given an etchasketch as a computer to do "real" work on but with the iron filings only accessible when with a tethering plan.

With all the talk of schools mandating that children have equivalent devices, what was wrong with writing on paper and doing maths on paper? We managed at school.