
Why the Chromebook pundits are out of touch with reality - mikeevans
http://gigaom.com/2013/11/11/why-the-chromebook-pundits-are-simply-out-of-touch-with-reality/
======
bowlofpetunias
My wife got to test-drive Chromebooks for work. She's not exactly a power
user, but found the limited functionality and restrictive environment
incredibly frustrating.

Her conclusion was that computers should do exactly what the user wants to,
either because they are incredibly well designed withing specific constraints
(iPad), or because they simply do as they're told (PC's, Macs).

The Chromebook is neither, it basically does what Google thinks people should
do, without any of the depth and sophistication of Apple's opinionated user
experience. They may hit the sweet spot for some, but it seems to me to be a
very small niche.

The end result was that my wife was ready to throw the thing out the window,
and handed it over to me with the words "see how long you last before you want
to smash it".

~~~
VikingCoder
My wife got to test-ride these new Ford Auto-Mobiles for work. She's not
exactly a power equestrian, but found the limited off-road capabilities
incredibly frustrating.

Her conclusion was that horses should do exactly what the rider wants to,
either because they have been trained, or because the rider knows how to ride
them well.

The auto-mobile is neither, it basically does what Mr. Ford thinks it should
do, without any of the depth and sophistication of a purebred. They may hit
the sweet spot for some, but it seems to me to be a very small niche.

The end result was that my wife was ready to drive the thing off a cliff, and
handed the keys over to me with the words "see how long you last before you
want to smash it."

</snark>

The problem I think your wife had was that her work environment isn't designed
for Chromebooks (like having the infrastructure like gas stations for cars).
If someone uses Google Docs and GMail for all of their business
communications, and Hangouts for chatting, and Chrome Remote Desktop to access
remote machines, and Chrome Web Printing to print, etc... then the Chromebook
is awesome.

And to be honest, many (if not most) workplaces will never make the switch.

~~~
diydsp
Did your wife have to support a perpetual international war to support the
fuel for her chromebook? Was the chromebook responsible for thousands of
deaths per month? Was the Chromebook that much better than the horse? Was your
analogy glib but off the mark?

no, no, no and yes. Arguing for Chromebook is arguing for limitation. If the
Chromebook actually was as much of an improvement on web-surfing as the car
was to the horses, your analogy might start to gain traction. The fact that it
just barely holds its own, for a similar price, with much huger limitations
doesn't appeal to a rational mind.

Chromebook is moving the goalposts for a machine. "Just forget about running
any software that's not a web browser and you'll be fine! <waves hands> My
grandfather only reads the web, so it's fine for him."

Here's a tip: every platform starts off lightweight and accrues cruft. Even
Linux (cough ubuntu) and OSX (cough 10.6). If Chromebook grows in popularity,
they'll hit the same issues other major OS vendors have hit. There's nothing
magic about them, except they've lowered the goalposts of acceptability
criteria.

If you want a lightweight machine, put linux on a laptop with an SSD and it
will blow your socks off.

~~~
VikingCoder
And by the way, no one ever won any prizes for pointing out that an analogy
was flawed, if you took it too far.

I can have eight computers, and be working on the same document on all of
them. Web-based document creation, for my workflows, is vastly superior to the
old school way of doing things. And Google Docs is the best instance of it,
for me, so far.

You'll try to destroy the analogy again, so I shouldn't bother, but once upon
a time, you BOOTED your computer to a game disk. And people like you opined
that people would never run their games from inside Windows, because the
performance was BY DEFINITION worse, and why would you want to, anyway?

The cruft of a Chromebook is poorly designed web pages. And unlike other
systems, which build their cruft in, Google has been keeping Chrome relatively
clean - it's the minimum browser you need. The magic is they didn't build
anything in.

------
csmuk
I disagree and find this is just another gushing fanboy defending fandom.

Chromebooks are fine for the 80% case like normal PCs but that last 20% is
impossible unlike normal PCs. There are certain things that you just cannot
do. It is disingenuous to market them as PC alternatives or general purpose
computers.

They are merely different and not better

I'm not sure they are ethically acceptable either as they are solely to
promote and lock people into google's ecosystem. This is a dangerous line to
tread. Vendor lock in has been made socially acceptable now through years of
marketing in a typical us vs them fashion. If you're not taking a side, you
are an outcast.

And no I don't think installing Ubuntu on them is a good solution either.

I genuinely have nothing positive to say about them. And yes I have owned one.

~~~
warfangle
> There are certain things that you just cannot do.

Until you snag crouton and then all of a sudden you've got a plenty-fast linux
laptop on top of a really nice SSD.

~~~
csmuk
Crouton is a defeatist crutch, not a solution for every day use.

If you're using Crouton, you are denying yourself the flexibility of a proper
computer artificially.

It's like buying a Prius and sticking a big exhaust and a spoiler on it. Just
buy a different car.

~~~
jolan
Well, there's chrubuntu if you don't like Crouton.

~~~
csmuk
There are also other, far superior laptops that run Ubuntu for the same money.

~~~
MrMeker
For example? I recently stepped on my ChroutonBook and am looking for a
replacement.

~~~
csmuk
Anything that isn't a ChromeBook that you can install either windows or Linux
on be it new or second hand.

I'd suggest a second hand ThinkPad T series as that can definitely be stood
on.

------
pmiller2
I agree completely with the article. In fact, I would go so far as to say that
the netbook-class Chromebooks are probably the best machines in their class.
You don't have to deal with the operating system very much, because all the
important things (like updates and security) are taken care of for you. And,
if you want to do a little light office-type work, you have the Google office
apps.

Now, the Chromebook Pixel, OTOH, might just be mistargeted. I don't think it
makes sense to spend $1300+ on a laptop that's _only_ going to be accessed
through a browser. (The article was right in the sense that the browser isn't
the OS -- it's more like the window manager.) Most people whose needs mandate
a $1300-$1500 laptop should be running Windows or OSX, simply because the app
ecosystem is a lot richer.

------
hoverkraft
Really appreciate this perspective. Reminds me of this quote from Steve Jobs:

"I'm trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all
cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people
started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people
will need them. And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy...
because the PC has taken us a long way. They were amazing. But it changes.
Vested interests are going to change. And, I think we've embarked on that
change. Is it the iPad? Who knows? Will it be next year or five years? ... We
like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's
uncomfortable."

~~~
csmuk
It's uncomfortable because it's wrong and there is big resistance. I am part
of that resistance.

The transition from the fragmented computer market in the 80's brought relief
via standardisation into the clone PC and the rise of the Internet. Now it's
fragmenting again into separate walled gardens.

The post-PC era that everyone keeps rabbiting on about is a battle between the
big players. We'll all lose and be back to separate non-connected ecosystems,
just like the 80's when you had a BBC micro and everyone else had C64's so you
couldn't play last ninja...

Its already happened in the mobile space which consists of three ecosystems
and some "promoted as ridiculous and unfashionable" old fashioned telephones.

~~~
jsloat
How is more choice and innovation a bad thing? What actual cross-system
limitations are you worried about?

I switch from iOS to Android seamlessly, as my digital life is platform
agnostic. I am more invested in Google's ecosystem in terms of where my data
lives, but until they remove the ability to export/sync that data (e.g. I can
download all Drive files at once, and simultaneously convert them to Office or
PDF format), I don't feel all that "walled".

~~~
csmuk
It's not more choice, as the only outcome is choosing which garden you are
slowly walled into. Gaining market share is the desired outcome only as the
shareholders need to see growth.

The innovation stops when you are captive. We all learned this in the 90's
with Microsoft. People are quite young or have a short memory I'm sure.

I have no problem with limitations. I have a problem investing time and money
in something that cannot be used under my terms. The computer is my minion,
not my taskmaster not a convenient pipe to shove content down my throat (I
already have a television thank you).

------
porpoisemonkey
I haven't seen anyone mention what I suspect is the target audience for
Chromebooks - aging Americans. This is expected to be one of the fastest
growing demographics in the United States thanks to the Post-World War II Baby
Boom of the late 1940-1960's.

"The older population--persons 65 years or older--numbered 39.6 million in
2009 (the latest year for which data is available). They represented 12.9% of
the U.S. population, about one in every eight Americans. By 2030, there will
be about 72.1 million older persons, more than twice their number in 2000.
People 65+ represented 12.4% of the population in the year 2000 but are
expected to grow to be 19% of the population by 2030."
[http://www.aoa.gov/Aging_Statistics/](http://www.aoa.gov/Aging_Statistics/)

~~~
munificent
> I haven't seen anyone mention what I suspect is the target audience for
> Chromebooks - aging Americans.

Not just aging Americans, but _kids of aging Americans buying computers for
their parents_. That's why "no viruses" and "no configuration" are such big
deals: Chromebooks are a solution to the dreaded "home for the holidays,
spending eight hours fixing Dad's horribly infested PC" problem.

------
jfasi
These pundits are victims to a basic error in technology: they assume they
themselves are typical users, and that their experiences and preferences can
be projected onto the rest of the market. They rightfully observe that for
them as consumers (which is shorthand for their financial preferences, product
profile, experience, and demanded intensity of experience) the Chromebook
doesn't seem like a particularly viable option.

Once you take yourself out of your own head, and consider people for whom
price is important, who don't demand products outside what the browser
provides, who don't have a tremendous amount of experience, and who don't
demand a particularly intense experience from their computer, the Chromebook
looks a lot more attractive.

The tl;dr of it is: don't assume the entire market is like you.

------
andrewchoi
I've gone through two Chromebooks (first the Acer AC700, and now the HP
Chromebook 11) and I will say that the first thing I did with both of them was
install Ubuntu alongside them. I spend maybe <20% of my time in Chrome OS, and
the majority of time in Ubuntu.

Important to note that I'm currently a student and using LaTeX a lot, and
AFAIK I can't run pdflatex on Chrome OS.

However, I'm expecting my use case to change: the AC700 had an Intel Atom, and
thus could run dropboxd, and there is apparently no port of dropboxd to ARM.
We'll see how things change.

------
philthesong
I bought a Chromebook, installed ubuntu and played with it. The machine heats
up fast and lags too much. The Chromebook couldn't even handle a default
office app in ubuntu.

These so-called pundits are getting huge sum of money from ASUS, Samsung,
google, etc...

~~~
jlgreco
> _The machine heats up fast_

Chromebook Pixel? My Pixel is the hottest machine I have ever used...

------
adamb_
I've recommended Chromebook separately to 2 individuals over the age of 40,
and they both own & love it. Neither of these people are tech savy, and just
wanted something to "work." The big sell for both of them was:

1) low cost for modern hardware (most windows laptops in the same price range
were old or had bottom-barrel components.)

2) no more worrying about viruses & (more importantly) no anti-virus software.

3) if they would've stayed with windows they would've had to learn windows 8,
so the advantage of staying in "familiar territory" was lost (one was
upgrading from XP.)

------
cromwellian
Every platform has an escape hatch. For the iPad, when there's something you
can't do, beyond it's limits, you would go use a real computer. For Macs, you
use to run to the refuge of Bootcamp, or Parallels, to get to run something
you can't run on OSX.

For Chromebooks, you run to Crouton.

There's no device that does everything without compromise, but for some
people, 90% of the time, all they need is a browser with a full-sized keyboard
and largish screen.

~~~
DanBC
> all they need is a browser

How did we get so far from The Unix Way of "one tool does one job and does it
well", to "just cram it into the browser"?

~~~
cromwellian
The Unix Way(tm) is great for developers, but ties you to enormous local
client state. "Just cram it into the browser" has lots of advantages for many
use cases:

1) actual computer local state irrelevent. If HD fails or computer falls into
a river, it's no big deal.

2) Sharing your computer is a lot easier. Hand a ChromeBook to someone and
they are instantly productive with it, as there is no need to "set up" their
environment and all their apps.

3) Arguably more secure. Big decrease in surface area for private attackers to
penetrate with viruses or malware. Arguably, increase in surface area for
government surveillance. Depends on whether you find Eastern European hackers
getting your financial info more damaging to you than the NSA/GCHQ.

Ask yourself this: Does Captain Picard carry around an entire copy of the
Enterprise computer on him, or does his com-badge just talk to the ship
computer? Cloud computing is the latest iteration in the pivot between
mainframe and client, and for some usage models, it is far more convenient to
cloud host all of your state, and make your client very thin and cheap.

------
ripter
> Oh, and those apps work outside of the browser, so “using a single web
> browser window with multiple tabs” simply isn’t accurate. Since May, for
> example, I’ve been playing a console-like game in its own window on my
> Chromebook using an Xbox 360 controller. Just a browser, indeed…

The Chrome browser has supported the XBox controller for a while now. It also
supports fullscreen. (Firefox might support them, but I'm not sure.)

------
chestnut-tree
Simplicity does not mean the absence of features. ChromeOS is simple because
it does not have the capability to include features we take for granted in
desktop software. For example, in Google Docs you cannot merge two or more
table cells. This is hardly an advanced feature, it's something Wordperfect
5.0 could do 20 years ago. How is this progress?

Some things are certainly not simpler on a Chromebook. For example, printing
requires signing in via Google's cloud print service even if it's just to
print to your desktop printer (which also means Google can record when and how
often you print.)

More seriously, ChromeOS gives Google an _unprecedented_ opportunity to track
and record your online behaviour (since you must sign-in to ChromeOS with a
Google account to use the operating system). This raises important questions
about privacy, but Google gets away with little scrutiny of what they record
and track.

~~~
jsloat
You can definitely merge in Google Spreadsheets, is this a ChromeOS-specific
limitation you're referencing? There are, of course, plenty of other
limitations of the Drive suite.

~~~
chestnut-tree
It's a limitation of Google Documents. You can try it yourself. Create a
Google Document, insert a table (Insert > Table) and, er, that's it. If you
want to merge table cells, you're out of luck. There's no function that will
allow you.

------
brianbreslin
I bought a samsung chrome book at Walmart last week. I paid $250+ Florida
sales tax. I bought it as an emergency backup device, as my MacBook Air was
giving me problems. That being said, the device is still just ok. I was
expecting it to do two thinsg really well: surf the web, and use google
drive/gmail. Unfortunately the CPU in this device is a bit weak, so it
struggled loading sites like Facebook, and using spreadsheets on google docs
was not fun (suuuuper slow).

I just wanted those two things to work well, and they didn't. I didn't need
any games, or great video rendering, just for chrome to work perfectly.

I am going to return it, and buy an external keyboard for my iPad mini. Using
spreadsheets on the iPad is tough, but surfing the web and sending emails is
more responsive.

------
fit2rule
My favourite current hacked up laptop is a Motorola Lapdock paired with a
small collection of PC-on-a-stick thingies, an rPi, a couple Beagleboards ..
all very plug and play. With an Ubuntu-on-a-stick, I'm even able to build work
projects and use it as a production machine.

It'd be nice if the fanboix stopped arguing the trivialities of the software -
which after all, by now - with all the variations out there - is proving to be
not so hard as the one thing that matters in this race: sensible hardware.

An upgradable laptop is what I want. I'll keep the screen, the keys, etc.
Just, unplug one CPU, stick in another as needed for various things .. I hope
that happens soon.

------
david2777
I got a Chromebook as a supplementary computer. I'm a 3D Art student so I
never expected it to replace my rig, but I thought it would be nice to take
notes in GenEd classes and browse the internet between classes or on the couch
at home. It works perfect for that.

What surprised me was some of my non-techie friends saw my Chromebook and
decided to get one. They stream their music and the only thing they used their
Windows laptops for was the internet and typing up essays and stuff up. It
took them a while to get used to not being able to install anything but
between their smartphone and their Chromebook they can pretty much do anything
they need.

------
shmerl
I'd say if you want a webby OS for the sake of webbiness, then try Firefox OS.
Otherwise regular Linux distro will be much better for desktop use.

~~~
scythe
Can one not put Firefox OS on a Chromebook? Actually, that might be one of the
better aftermarket modifications...

~~~
shmerl
Regular Firefox OS is using Android graphics stack, so one will have to build
it for regular Linux graphics stack such as X.org. Not sure if that's
configurable out of the box.

------
6ren
I don't think there are any laptops comparable to the Acer C720 performance
(Haswell) at a comparable price. It benchmarks at about half a 2013 Macbook
Air (also Haswell). That said, I'd whack ubuntu on it, and love it as a
netbook.

But I do doubt chromebooks will be big hit, they're neither fish nor foul,
since tablets stole netbooks' market.

~~~
samspenc
Yeah, there was another article about how developers are buying Chromebooks
just to put Ubuntu on it: [http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/355875-four-of-top-
six-lapto...](http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/355875-four-of-top-six-laptops-
on-amazon-are-chromebooks/)

For my next laptop, I am more and more inclined to get a Chromebook and put
Ubuntu on it using chrouton...

------
kyberias
This is a very biased and weird article.

I think it speaks for itself that it is very common to put Chromebook in
developer mode and use crouton to enable full Linux experience. I had to do it
since there's so little to achieve using Chrome browser only. Sad but true.

------
vondur
I only know of a few people that have purchased a Chromebook, but it seems the
only use it for a bit and then not use it. They tend to go back to their
laptop or tablet.

------
camus2
They are not out of touch , they get paid to promote chromebooks, After
getting paid to promote netbooks. The problem is people listening the
narrative.

