
Google’s PixelBook: the target is bigger than it seems - PKop
https://chromeunboxed.com/googles-pixelbook-the-target-is-bigger-than-you-think/
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StudentStuff
Google might be targeting high end enterprise needs, but breaking into that
market is a long, painful road predicated on strong sales/IT relationships.
Hence why you don't see ODMs eating large portions of the market, Dell, HP and
Lenovo offer essentially the same product, but with sales and some support.

From what I've read on other threads about high end Chromebook Pixel's,
getting them repaired if there is a manufacturers defect, or worse yet it gets
damaged is very inconvenient and costly. Comparatively, replacing a smashed
screen in a T440 is a $50, sub-5 minute affair, and Dell & HP's enterprise
laptops seem just as repairable (albeit parts are 40% to 50% more).

~~~
justabystander
There's also Google's terrible reputation of poor and unreachable support, as
well as the unappealable terminations of service. And they're not limited to
consumers - some companies have had service terminated leaving them with no
recourse.

Google's offerings are as much software as hardware, and having Google drop
your account over a misunderstanding and thereby disabling all your laptops
for several weeks would be a nightmare. Many of the people in charge of making
purchasing decisions will have this type of concern in mind.

Whether they can turn that around and make a strong enterprise support channel
is a valid question. But it's going to take some strong sales and tech to get
people to risk trying it out. Google's a great company as long as you don't
have to actually talk to anyone. Which makes them wholly undesirable for
companies that obsess over the number of nines in their reliability.

~~~
dannyr
> Google's terrible reputation of poor and unreachable support

My experience is not the same for all the products I bought for Google.

It was really easy to contact support and replacement devices came quickly.

~~~
kuschku
We're in Germany, and have tried for 4 months to get my sister's Nexus 5X
repaire d or replaced. The damage was caused by a third party, who is willing
to pay for repair or replace.

So far, so simple.

It's been 4 months of calls, emails, faxes, and sending the device back and
forth between Google, LG, the insurance, and the repair facility.

Google says they're not responsible for Nexus devices, so we should talk to
LG. LG says they're not responsible, we should talk to Google. We got someone
at LG to discuss this, and they told us to send it to their official repair
facility. They just sent it back because of a typo on the form, or because the
insurance didn't say fast enough that they'd fund it, or because "dunno".

We've now taken the device to Media Markt to get it repaired, and it took 2
days.

Never ever are we going to buy a device from Google again.

~~~
joshuamorton
Odd, it took me a single phone call to get my 5X replaced when it started
bootlooping. I called Google, and they replaced it well out of warranty after
a 20 minute phonecall.

(disclosure I work at google but this was before I started)

~~~
kuschku
That may be fine if you get a warranty replacement, but even if you want to
pay, getting a repair is basically horror.

This is now the second time we’ve had this odyssey with Google (the Nexus 7
2012 being the first case), and by now it’s obvious it’s not a problem with
the OEM, but Google.

------
igravious
I wonder might Google be making a play for the Macbook segment of the market?
That'd be interesting. Imagine a non-Windows high end laptop able to go toe to
toe with Apple quality and design but running a very secure version of Linux.

I know that Apple Macbooks are as popular as ever but there has been some
grumbling that RAM is limited, the touchbar has caused a split in opinions,
and there has been suggestions that Apple is trailing Intel's top of the line
chip launches, and finally that Mac OS X is not getting the love that iOS is
getting.

Put that all together and maybe Google has a small window of opportunity to
surprise the dev community and bring out a kick-ass Linux laptop workstation
to offer true competition to Apple on their home turf. That would be pretty
exciting, all the more so if they got within sniffing distance. Since the
demise of SUN Solaris and SGI Irix workstations and the like Apple has had
this segment (brawny Unix workstations) pretty much all to themselves in a
way.

Dream machine: Great Intel hardware, RAM up to 64G, decent graphics card,
flawless 2D/3D drivers (minimum brawn needed for ML work), ChromeOS w/ dev
tools a couple of command line scribbles away, software repo as large as
Debian/Unubtu/Arch/Gentoo, ability to run Android apps, Secureboot and non-
reboot kernel/driver updates, ability to install my won boot key if I so wish,
fingerprint reader –– hey I did say dream machine!

~~~
jacksmith21006
Exactly what I would love. A Linux MacBook. That is really secure and then the
cherry on top would be also Android support. Really hope that is what we will
get with Pixelbook.

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AdmiralAsshat
If Google wants to go enterprise, they need to get their support act together.

I had a 2013 Chromebook Pixel that started to have a vertical line of dead
pixels running down the screen. It should have been a simple fix. But first,
Google didn't want to repair the thing because it was barely out of its one-
year warranty (which you can't even pay to extend, by the way). Then, when
they finally relented and agreed to take it, they sent me a new one, rather
than fixing the other one. There have been minor problems with it since then,
but I don't dare try to get them addressed, given that the laptop is way out
of warranty and no longer manufactured.

My next laptop after the Pixel was a Dell XPS 13. And that was in no small
part because I knew that Dell could provide hardware support if something
broke. I even paid additional support to extend my warranty through 2019,
because it's mission critical that this thing work.

Google needs to understand that there's no way any reasonable person can be
expected to spend $1200+ on a laptop that can become a paperweight because it
suffers a hardware failure and the manufacturer refuses to touch it. The
"rumor" is that the original Pixel was created because Google themselves was
having trouble getting support from Apple for their employee Macbooks, which
makes the lack of Pixel support even more mind-boggling.

~~~
euyyn
I've heard support for customers of GSuite is pretty good.

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discreditable
Speaking as a "Enterprise" with over 800 Windows PCs deployed to students and
teachers. The primary draw of a Chrome device to us has been the cost. The
pixelbook does not have that advantage. It will be a very hard sell if the
pixel devices end up costing just as much as an equivalent Lenovo ThinkPad. If
they can't compete on price anymore they need to make the features at least as
good or better. They just are not there yet.

~~~
ac29
The article is speculating this will be targeted towards developers. A laptop
shipping with out of the box VMs/containers for ChromeOS, Android, Ubuntu, and
Windows, with easy VM management could have a compelling sales-pitch (at least
if support is decent, which is the biggest question).

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kbutler
TLDR: commits indicate ChromeOS will be able to host virtual machines.

This still fits the "device for google internal use that they also sell
outside" model since the Pixel 2013, with perhaps increasing emphasis on
selling outside.

Making ChromeOS a stable, durable hypervisor that also hosts other OSes
(better linux support than Crouton, and possibly adding windows support) just
makes it an ever-more viable replacement for those-other-companies' high-end
laptops.

Is there any benefit of a VM-friendly ChromeOS retaining Chrome as root-level
functionality? Why not move the Chrome-browser-UI into a client VM as well,
parallel to Linux and Windows clients?

~~~
digi_owl
Well the way they have ChromeOS support Android apps is by putting effectively
the whole Android framework in a container.

Taking this a step further would not surprise me the least.

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freekh
I am hoping it’s gonna be ARM based and that it will be easyish to install
Linux on it. ARMs, at least apples cores, finally seem to have gotten fast
enough to be powering my main/Dev machine and if I could get the screen, look
n feel, ram and disk that’s high-end enough I am jumping at it. I am really
hoping for something to be replacing the x86 with something more open, more
secure and more battery friendly.

~~~
hawski
ARMs are mostly horrible in case of drivers. I have an Acer Chromebook 13 with
nVidia Tegra K1. Around the beginning of this year videos can get pixelated
[1]. Generally there are few graphical glitches - boot splash screen can have
many short black lines overlaid, mouse cursor can have some random garbage in
it.

I had to once wait over an update, because it broke the system. It had
symptoms of GPU driver issue.

Generally I'm quite pleased with the machine, but I wouldn't buy another ARM
Chromebook. Rockchip SoCs have drivers mostly open source from what I
understand, but GPU driver is not OS. Intel is safer bet. I really like the
idea of AMD Chromebook, but you can't have everything.

[1] [https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chromebook-
cent...](https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/chromebook-
central/jByKcbxQ0V8/jRYMA7HtBQAJ;context-place=forum/chromebook-central)

~~~
freekh
Thanks I am gonna check this one out! I don't care about graphics to be
honest.

------
martin_drapeau
It looks like Google may target devs and leverage containers (i.e. Docker) to
run to their cloud services or even other OSes locally.

After all, Google is a SaaS and developing a SaaS requires back-end services.
I run a SaaS and on the dev side, we've dockerized the database, cache, and
other services. Google's plan may be to provide local versions of their cloud
services for development on the PC.

The PC is powerful enough to run all of this. 512GB of storage and (hopefully)
a powerful processor would explain this.

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tonyedgecombe
Why would I buy hardware from an advertising company?

~~~
deanCommie
Because they're trying to diversify and find new revenue streams that don't
depend on advertising.

~~~
mtgx
Good for them. So do you think that when Google will make billions of dollars
in profit a year from the hardware it sells, it will stop tracking user
behavior on those same machines?

~~~
skj
Now _that_ seems like a move that would get picked up by monopoly watch dogs.

------
ericfrederich
A link within that article mentioned Android Studio possibly running on it.
Who cares? Are there any developers who live 100% in an IDE? I use Sublime
Text in addition to a full blown IDE because sometimes there's stuff that you
know will be tedious in an IDE and simpler with your go-to editor.

Until you can run Sublime Text, and bash (with perl, python, sed, awk, etc, or
any other arbitrary piece of software I don't see developers moving to this
device.

~~~
RubenSandwich
Lots of iOS and Mac developers for better or worse live in Xcode, same with C#
developers and Visual Studio. So even if it just runs Android Studio there
could be a developer market for it.

~~~
ufmace
Can confirm that if you're doing C#, you're probably never leaving Visual
Studio. Nothing can touch the VS autocomplete, and the text editing features
are at least pretty good.

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amelius
Lots of large enterprises don't even allow the use of Gmail, let alone a
device made by Google.

~~~
halflings
"Google will stop scanning your Gmail messages to sell targeted ads" [0]

Likely because of this fear that Google might be using corporate data (even if
it was not done for corporate emails, aka Google Apps / GSuite, even before
this policy).

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15862492/google-gmail-
adv...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/23/15862492/google-gmail-advertising-
targeting-privacy-cloud-business)

~~~
mtgx
And it only took a few lawsuits and anti-trust cases against Google to do
that. How generous of them.

~~~
icebraining
Which lawsuits were those?

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mtgx
For how long are Chromebooks supported again? I can use a PC for more than 10
years if I want. Do Chromebooks approach that level of support? Or are they
the "Android phones" of PCs?

~~~
bergie
Chromebooks get 5 years of OS updates

~~~
Nephilim777
6 1/2 now. :)

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guyromm
"..much bigger than what we have seen on the surface"

no pun intended? :)

------
technofiend
I suppose it depends on the enterprise but working in a highly regulated
environment that wants to guard against data exfiltration, desktops and
laptops are the exception not the rule. And once you build out infrastructure
to support virtual desktops served up by low cost appliances, there's no
compelling reason to go back to something like a chromebook. I have no idea
what the discount would be when you buy 10,000 thin terminals but they're
pretty much disposable when they break at the kind of pricing I'd guess one
would enjoy.

------
diminish
"enterprise" is not that easy as there are a lot of financial /creative /
inhouse apps requiring .net, windows, ms office and adobe stuff which will be
too hard to run on pixelbook. it could be best if google targeted the
startup/SV crowd with a high end, linux-installable workstation just for PR. I
think of macbook pro or thinkpad killer. but when it comes to hardware google
underwhelms recently.

~~~
romanovcode
Also, active directory.

------
throw2016
Somehow the idea of running VMs on laptops never adds up. The constrained
laptop environment just doesn't lend itself to that use case.

Using cloud resources or ssh'ng to other boxes just about make sense which you
can do with any laptop. But any heavy apps or workloads will have your fans
spinning up, throttling and heat and generally reduce the life of a pretty
expensive product.

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ballenf
If this means that Google is attempting to shift to having its customers be
anyone but advertisers, this is probably a good thing for everyone. There
GSuite product is pretty good and even has reasonable privacy controls. I want
to like Google more than I can with their current loyalty to the advertisers
paying the bills.

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royge
Can I ran docker without some hacks?

~~~
martin_drapeau
I reckon this is where its going. It will allow for a local cloud. Need M*SQL,
Elastic, Redis, etc? Run it in a container. The PC is powerful enough to do
it.

~~~
_asummers
Likely Minikube on the box by default, if I were a betting man.

------
jacksmith21006
This sounds pretty cool if it ends up correct. Able to develop GNU/Linux on
the my laptop just makes sense as the cloud is Linux in most cases.

Then to get a secure Chrome OS and the cherry on top is Android support.

