What’s the point of a Chromebook?
Gary Marshall over at TechRadar, echoing my thoughts on Google’s Chromebooks:
Given the choice between a netbook that runs Chrome and nothing else and a netbook that costs less, runs Windows 7 and will happily run the Chrome browser—which, so far, seems faster than the Chrome OS does—I’d go for the netbook.
And for people going, “AHA! But the Chromebook is light, quick, with solid-state storage and decent battery life, idiot-face”:
Unfortunately I’ve already dropped four hundred quid on something that boots instantly, is easy to use, delivers better battery life than a Chromebook, looks better than a Chromebook, is more portable than a Chromebook, has solid state storage like a Chromebook and that can, with the right software, take full advantage of the cloud. It’s a tablet.
This.
Much easier to write, blog and work with a keyboard though.
@Dave: Windows netbooks had keyboards, last time I looked. And tablets can easily enough be paired with Bluetooth keyboards and still come in at a competitive price-point.
It’s a tight and overlapping market admittedly, but I think Chromebooks will have some appeal – faster, easier and more secure than Windows and more useful than a tablet with that keyboard (I’m thinking spreadsheets and short story writing rather than watching Toy Story). Offline performance will have to be good though.
Although the current Chromebook is hardly what you’d call a desirable piece of tech, this is quite obviously the future of computing. Soon we’ll all be working in the cloud (in fact, I already do – Google mail, docs, etc) it’s only a matter of time.
As soon as Apple announce a similar cloud-based strategy I fully expect Revert to Saved to welcome it as the second coming. 😉
@Damien: Despite suffering the odd outage and usability issue, I do like Google’s cloud services. I’m just not seeing a bit market for a Chromebook. It seems the solution to bulky, expensive laptops from four years ago, which was a bigger niche than “people who like Google a whole lot but don’t want a Windows laptop, can’t afford or don’t want an Apple laptop, and don’t want an iPad or any other kind of tablet device”.
That you can get Windows laptops for roughly the same price (which can run the same kind of software) in the UK makes me think the pricing is utterly crazy.
On ‘the cloud’, I’ve no idea what Apple will announce, but I’m not holding my breath. MobileMe is a joke, bar the impressive iOS device location search, and it’s not really succeeded in this space elsewhere. (IMaybe Apple should buy SugarSync or Dropbox.) However, I’m also on the fence regarding the cloud anyway. I really like the ‘access anywhere’ idea, but the UK’s hampered by data restrictions. Uploading my user data would take a couple of months, and unless you’re on an unmetered and uncapped download option, you’ll cane through bandwidth really quickly.