
Google offers better Chromebook pricing to lure businesses and schools - evo_9
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/google-offers-better-chromebook-pricing-to-lure-businesses-and-schools.ars
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WiseWeasel
I still remember when the original iPhone came out without support for native
3rd party software development, and Steve Jobs said with a perfectly straight
face that the web is our SDK. Faced with the capabilities offered by native
first party software at the time, it didn't fly then, (and that was on a
phone, not a laptop), and I just don't see things having progressed enough in
the four years since then for it to fly now. Maybe if they try again in
another four years, when the state-of-the-art of web software and service
creation and usage will have advanced a bit more, they'd encounter more
enthusiastic support for this product. Hopefully, they haven't nixed the whole
project by that point.

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lukifer
Browser capabilities have come a long way since 2007, and the use cases are
very different between mobile consumer apps and business apps. While
ChromeBooks aren't able to fill every need, I bet they could still fit the
needs of a lot of organizations. I've worked in at least a couple places where
every single business app was web-based.

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nextparadigms
They wouldn't have had a pricing problem if they would've went with a powerful
ARM chip from the beginning, like say Nvidia's quad core Tegra 3, which
handles browsing quite well:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yab7mv9yOm8>

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joshu
Given that it doesn't run any external binaries, they still could?

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nextparadigms
I know they could and they probably will, but what I'm saying is that it could
be too late. They had to make a first impression with Chromebooks and they
blew it, in big part because of the pricing. They did the very same mistake
with the Google TV Revue that was also powered by Atom and cost $300, while
the ARM-based Apple TV was $100. And it seems they still haven't learned their
lesson, now making all future Android versions optimized for Atom.

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iamelgringo
_Business pricing under this model is $559 or $639 up-front for the Chromebook
and first year of service_

ZOMG...

[http://www.frys.com/search?query_string=&cat=-68384&...](http://www.frys.com/search?query_string=&cat=-68384&pType=pDisplay&rows=50&sort=price%20asc&start=0&cat=-68384&from=0&to=24)

Google dudes... I know you can't tell me anything because of NDA's and lawyers
and stuff. But really? What are you thinking?

Why not pour a couple of $ Billion into Desktop Linux?

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esutton
all i have to say is I love my chromebook and the majority of people that diss
it haven't used one for more than a few days.

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redwood
Key problem with Chromebook = no client side caching... This coupled with the
nature of internet connections in America today (unreliable enough to lead to
a momentary lack of being able to type into a cloud doc once a day for a
moment) makes these products untenable for most users....

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bane
$200 - with decentish netbooks that can do all that and more at ~$250-270,
chromebooks will never fly until they can hit $200.

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protomyth
That's still too high. We can get bulk pricing cheaper on HP net books with 3G
through Verizon cheaper.

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chugger
The Chromebook is the modern day Net PC.

