I feel like pulled off right, this "shared ecosystem" approach across manufacturers can be very strong, and from a competition perspective is probably pretty healthy. That said, the "everything under one roof" pull of the Apple world is pretty strong.
I've been pretty happy with my Google hardware so far (Nexus and then Pixel phones, Nest minis, pixel buds), but now that I'm interested in a smart watch, I'm running into a bit of a wall. I want to want a Pixel watch, but it sounds like the integration with the Pixel phone is not all that great, and for a lot of fitness tracking you also need a separate FitBit account, and have to use a separate FitBit app (!) and it doesn't integrate super well with all my existing data in Google's own Google Fit app that I've got.
I know it's not fair to compare these ~$400 laptops with Apple's laptops, but it just seems like Apple is better positioned to pull off seamless integration between laptops, phones, watches, earbuds, etc, when they're not working at cross purposes with a dozen other manufacturers.
Then again, some people probably actively don't want all this integration? Maybe just a simple, standalone, cheap laptop is ideal for them, and that's who this is targeting.
>pulled off right, this "shared ecosystem" approach across manufacturers can be very strong, and from a competition perspective is probably pretty healthy.
My bold prediction is that as consoles become more and more architecturally similar to home computers and MS & Sony continue to port more titles to PC, we will eventually see a unification of sorts where games are by default available on PC, with consoles serving as essentially a consistent and well-tested PC configuration for people who don't want to futz around with PC building. That's the role Steam Machines were supposed to play. They were a little too early IMO but the concept seems solid.
I have the pixel watch and I don't use the Fitbit stuff. Google fit is now first class on it, and it is a super well thought out and polished implementation. I'm really pleased with it
> when they're not working at cross purposes with a dozen other manufacturers.
Manufacturers of Chromebooks mostly only deal with the outer shell and branding of the device.
The computing hardware is controlled by Google, who set strict guidelines for compatibility. The ChromeOS software is of course completely controlled by Google. This announcement sounds like it's basically creating a new brand around an even more restrictive set of higher-performance hardware requirements.
> for a lot of fitness tracking you also need a separate FitBit acCount, and have to use a separate FitBit app
not for long. you will soon be required to migrate to Google by 2025. new Fitbit comes with controls for YouTube Music and none else. so the integrations are coming, which I absolutely love.
don't let Nadella hear you say you're moving from the Microsoft monopoly though ;)
> Eight new laptops from Acer, ASUS, HP and Lenovo.
From the article:
> Laptop shopping is harder than it should be. You can easily get lost in a sea of numbers and technical specs, and it's hard to know what products will actually give you what you need, at the price you want.
I also love Apple's OS and first-party apps' seamless integration. However, Google has a better story with cloud apps in gsuite. My Mac is overkill hardware for running a browser, but I like the build quality.
> However, Google has a better story with cloud apps in gsuite.
Except that they just set a death date for my go to whiteboarding app.
It was great to be able to have a dead simple paintbrush level drawing app that was shared in the browser, and I could sketch out on my tablet without dealing with drawing "boxes" and text labels to get an idea across.
The generic solutions are cheaper and more flexible, while the special all-included one is more user-friendly and can be better-optimized. It's similar with other products.
Why would it be a basic requirement? Cellular modems in laptop are an incredibly niche feature. They're only included in a handful of top-end business laptops and (in my experience) nobody even uses them when present.
I wonder how many laptops have cellular options right now. From a cursory look they're awfully niche (mostly business BTO models).
My best guess would be that the including the cellular chip and paying whoever (Qualcomm ?) holds the licensing fees, doing the qualification etc. is just that prohibitive.
> In addition to new Chromebook Plus devices, some existing Chromebooks will qualify for an OS update to include the enhanced features found on Chromebook Plus devices in the coming weeks.
"I've been pretty happy with my Google hardware so far".
I have a pixel phone. The hardware is impressive. The software is total junk. Everything is designed for to make you into an obsessive-compulsive phone junky. How many stupid alerts and notifications do I need per second. How many ads must I watch? I went back to an iphone despite feeling like the pixel was actually a really good piece of hardware. And an iPhone is not that much better any more.
Everything is designed for to make you
into an obsessive-compulsive phone junky.
[...] And an iPhone is not that much better
any more.
Regardless of OS, this seems like it's almost entirely down to the apps you use and the notification settings you pick. No? I rarely use Android so I may just be unfamiliar.
I switched to an iPhone about a year ago, and got annoyed at the pushy things iOS was doing that Android wasn't. So I switched back to Android recently, only to find that many of the annoying iOS things had now been adopted by Google. Great, thanks. I'll stick with Android for the near future though, as with a custom rooted ROM I can at least remove a lot of 'unremovable' stuff, even if I now have to play annoying cat and mouse games with apps trying to detect my rooted device and disable themselves.
I'm honestly confused by this comment. I use a Pixel phone and the reason I prefer it over my previous Samsung experiences is the UI is toned back and doesn't hit you with distractions.
Essentially they have defined "acceptable" performance across the board and given that a name. If I was looking for cheap hardware it ticks the boxes just about. "AI" is just a transparent marketing attempt at throwing a hot buzzword that most people don't understand into the mix.
Not awful but it really could do with a more ambitious tier, a lot of manufacturers will meet the requirements as set out (all laptops shown have 1080p displays, which is disappointing as many chromebooks had better before, 3:2 and 4k displays). We had 16GB chromebook options nearly a decade ago (mar 2015).
In fact I think would have been preferable if they made this the chromebook minimum requirements and called those with less "chromebook lite" ("Go" already served as this I think?); because celeron/4GB/64GB/<1080p display/webcam is really pushing things for a new device in late 2023 onwards, even as a facebook machine.
Have you actually used a Chromebook, like, spent more than 10 hours working on them? If not, you should try such a laptop out and then come back with your opinion. Even Chromebooks with Celeron processors are very usable and beat Windows laptops with the same specs by miles.
Also want to point out high-end Chromebooks are expensive and likely don't sell very well due to its market. So here it is striking a balance. Which is why I won't be buying one of these. But other people will.
Chrome OS is fundamentally limited in what it can do, so I understand why no one would want to pay for overpowered hardware. Will not be buying one either.
My previous experience with low-end intel hardware has been universally negative, so I assumed the i3's are terrible. Passmark says they are far better than I would have guessed:
So, either these get hot and are power-outlet-dependent, or they throttle badly.
I wonder if suspend / resume works reliably. It did not for the last 4 intel laptops I owned, regardless of OS. That included Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Maybe the AMD ones are decent. It's a shame about the screen (and bizarre bios) though.
Very few people "need" more than a Pentium 4, but there are a lot of technically sufficient, practically unusable laptops out there. Modern Celerons dance that line of "usable on the web now, but who knows what next year brings" quite delicately.
My benchmark is "can this play an HD Youtube video full screen". Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task, but with remote education in the state that it's at, that would make life very hard for its users.
I've also seen laptops go from usable to unusable because everyone switched codecs and suddenly the hardware acceleration didn't work anymore.
I think an i3 with a modest amount of RAM is a good decision for a baseline. You can get away with less, but you'll have to constantly maintain your laptop to do so, tweaking settings as the computer ages and acceleration support dies out. For most people, the device will just slow down to a crawl.
An i3 and 8GB of RAM are technically overspecced today, but in five years time you'll be happy you didn't buy the Celeron.
This, a marketing term defining a set of specifications, is also almost exactly what "Ultrabook" does, for the opposite (upper) end of the market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook
Also, a Chromebook is a specifically prepared device with a highly customized Linux OS that is designed to interface very well with Google's services.
Imagine if your iPhone just stored everything in iCloud and didn't need or use much local storage; that's similar to what the original vision of a Chromebook was, and it was pretty successful at that (just ask a good percentage of school-aged children in the United States.)
Obviously, it's not for everyone, but it's probably perfect for a lot of potential use cases, and I know some serious developers exist who actually spend all their time on some of the great Chromebooks that are out there, and they're doing it by choice.
TLDR; you are not the target market. there is an audience in India for example of billions, that use FB lite with less features due to cost, limited bandwidth, etc
I have one. 64GB of memory and 2TB NVME. Pretty cool to be able to run android apps, crostini (lxd) and KVM machines (with nested virt) all at the same time.
Hard disagree from me. I've had a lot of Chromebooks and 3 frameworks, and it's a terrific match IMHO. I do wish you could switch back and forth between Linux and Chromebook without replacing the main board, but even that is a great fit. As needs change, you have options. Chromebook is great for many users especially now that it runs Linux apps, and can even be a very capable dev machine.
Imagine all the schools with Chromebooks deployed, suddenly there's an option for their own IT staff to easily replace broken parts instead of buying new Chromebooks or sending them elsewhere to repair. Decent market for that.
I'd buy a Chromebook if I can kick Google out of the picture, use the hardware to run Linux in full control and still get outstanding battery life. Like a poor man's(or smart man's? ) M* Macs.
Why dont I just buy regular Windows laptop then? because they pay Windows tax and often come with weird power hungry choices because windows....
A lot of the Chromebook's battery saving features are the result of features of ChromeOS, not the Linux kernel, i.e. ChromeOS uses ML to predict how fast to charge the battery [1]. Tight integration between hardware and software has its advantages, just like with Apple products.
If you want the same battery life without ChromeOS, you need to talk to your preferred Linux distribution vendor and ask them to implement similar features.
I recently used 3x Dell 5190 and 1x Dell 3100 as touch-capable displays built into wooden cabinets running a Pygame app to communicate with a microcontroller and assorted electronics as part of a science festival booth.
The machines are rugged, have great battery life & durable screens, enough USB ports, space to run plenty of stuff, and I got them for $60 a piece refurbished and guaranteed good screen quality.
Can you not already do that? You can do enable developer mode and from there (in theory) it’s possible to use them as regular PCs and boot any Linux distro or even Windows. I don’t know about things like battery life though
You need to remove a write-protection screw from the logic board and replace the firmware, or the Chromebook will prompt you to factory-reset it at each boot. Very annoying, makes it feel like a useless toy.
While you need a (burner) gmail to login, you aren't obligated to use Google services on a Chromebook. The built-in Linux VM scratches the Linux development itch for me.
> run Linux in full control and still get outstanding battery life.
Why do you believe this would be the outcome? Good battery life is an attribute of software, not hardware. The likely outcome of slapping Fedora on a Chromebook will be exceedingly poor battery life and prolonged frustration as you attempt to figure out why it doesn't have energy efficiency parity with ChromeOS.
This hasn't been my experience with other devices that have upstreamed kernel device drivers. Worst case, you run powertop (or whatever), and change a few entries in /proc and /sys.
This is even true for phones. For instance, stock GrapheneOS gets 3-4x the battery life of stock Android on my Pixel 6 Pro.
(Graphene can't run many things from the android store until you install Google Play Services. That then reduces the battery life back to stock Android levels, except stuff is buggy. I gave up on using it.)
I don't see why it needs to be a Chromebook. You can install Linux on a regular Windows laptop, and you're probably not really paying extra for Windows preinstalled.
If you run vanilla Linux you don't get the outstanding battery life. ChromeOS runs a Google kernel and has all sorts of power management special sauce. I tried a few distros on an older Chromebook running SeaBIOS and I got maybe 60% of the runtime, not unlike Linux vs. Windows on my Framework 13.
I've been quite pleasantly surprised by the $250 Chromebook I got from Costco nearly a year ago when my Linux machine's hardware started failing. I originally got it because it was the quickest way to have something for writing emails that wasn't my phone. I ended up quite happy with it though.
It does everything I need outside of heavier duty programming, and I don't do so much of that in my spare time these days. You can code with it; I set up a for-fun Elixir/Phoenix project that I coded mostly on the Chromebook.
I do a lot of writing/communicating and I don't need anything more than what this computer provides.
This is fairly close to my revelation as well. I don't run "heavier duty programming" as OP says local anyhow. VSCode runs wonderfully, battery lasts forever and I run anything beyond trivial in some cloud instance. They are so light, the battery lasts so long and they are so cheap mine just bounces around in my backpack and is always with me.
Would a local nodejs webserver be easily doable for web dev? It's sorta ok on the cloud as long as you can SSH tunnel and run the browser locally, but you'd have to either sync code changes or use Vim over SSH (not always nice due to latency).
>All Chromebook Plus laptops come with the the following guaranteed hardware specs:
I feel like these sorts of guarantees used to be useful, but now I'm not sure.
Outside of my work computer, I buy off-lease ThinkPads for use around the home (ie family computers). I think the oldest one still in use is a 3rd generation i7. And it's totally fine as a daily driver.
On the other side, I bought an off-lease desktop that has a 7th gen(?) quad-core 8 thread i7 with 32GB of RAM, and it's not going to allow me to run Windows 11. Kind of silly.
It is especially funny because the pitch seems pretty similar to the Ultrabook pitch (thin and lights, but the branding guarantees some performance hurdle was passed—started more or less at the same time as the original Chromebook).
ChromeOS was of course notable as a laptop OS on both ARM and x86.
I suspect the whole Ultrabook thing kinda fizzled out as it became apparent that ARM was not getting much traction in laptops (other than Apple, but then, they are always an outlier).
The classic arm for ChromeOS is terrible, mostly because they cheaped out on CPU extensions and storage, and memory bandwidth. They mostly repurposed those cheap Android tablet designs that die after a year.
I use the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook (picked it up for $279 from Best Buy) and it is pretty amazing. OLED screen, ARM performance that's pretty good, a tablet that comes with a keyboard.
The key thing here is specifying 8Gb RAM as minimum spec and branding it accordingly.
What's hurt Chromebook's reputation is people buying discounted/value priced 4Gb ones, struggling with performance and concluding it's a terrible platform.
I'm intellectually curious what the experience of web-based video editing and Photoshop are like for anyone that actually needs to use these tools as part of their repeat workflow.
i agree, but i think they should have gone the other way. "chromebook plus" makes it sound like a premium product that you probably don't need. minimum 8GB of ram should be the standard configuration that most people go for. The people buying Chromebooks with 4GB of ram aren't going to be put off because it doesn't have the "chromebook plus" branding on it.
if they want to help the chromebook's reputation, they should be calling this the minimum spec for a chromebook, and putting "chromebook lite" or similar branding on the ones that don't meet it.
They do this with Android... follow certain specs (and other requirements) and you can have the Google suite of apps + Play Store access. If you don't, you're own your own.
It would be great if they could do that with Chromebooks - follow a minimum spec or otherwise <insert punishment>. Problem is, there isn't anything to hold back or punish with. Which leaves them in a situation where, other than a "made for Chromebook" endorsement that can be withheld, there's nothing to stop anyone making any laptop of any spec and calling it "Chromebook".
> What's hurt Chromebook's reputation is people buying discounted/value priced 4Gb ones, struggling with performance and concluding it's a terrible platform.
Doesn't help that they are made by a company that is now more icky than Microsoft and deservedly so IMO.
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I feel like pulled off right, this "shared ecosystem" approach across manufacturers can be very strong, and from a competition perspective is probably pretty healthy. That said, the "everything under one roof" pull of the Apple world is pretty strong.
I've been pretty happy with my Google hardware so far (Nexus and then Pixel phones, Nest minis, pixel buds), but now that I'm interested in a smart watch, I'm running into a bit of a wall. I want to want a Pixel watch, but it sounds like the integration with the Pixel phone is not all that great, and for a lot of fitness tracking you also need a separate FitBit account, and have to use a separate FitBit app (!) and it doesn't integrate super well with all my existing data in Google's own Google Fit app that I've got.
I know it's not fair to compare these ~$400 laptops with Apple's laptops, but it just seems like Apple is better positioned to pull off seamless integration between laptops, phones, watches, earbuds, etc, when they're not working at cross purposes with a dozen other manufacturers.
Then again, some people probably actively don't want all this integration? Maybe just a simple, standalone, cheap laptop is ideal for them, and that's who this is targeting.
I wish the Steam Machines didn't fail, they were pretty much this https://web.archive.org/web/20160303080731/https://store.ste...
One can say the Steam Deck is a better successor but I think mostly because of Proton itself became mature through the years (compared to 2016)
I could imagine a gaming Chromebox or Chromebook with dedicated graphics in the future.
> We’re launching eight new laptops
This reads like satire.
Manufacturers of Chromebooks mostly only deal with the outer shell and branding of the device.
The computing hardware is controlled by Google, who set strict guidelines for compatibility. The ChromeOS software is of course completely controlled by Google. This announcement sounds like it's basically creating a new brand around an even more restrictive set of higher-performance hardware requirements.
not for long. you will soon be required to migrate to Google by 2025. new Fitbit comes with controls for YouTube Music and none else. so the integrations are coming, which I absolutely love.
don't let Nadella hear you say you're moving from the Microsoft monopoly though ;)
From the article:
> Laptop shopping is harder than it should be. You can easily get lost in a sea of numbers and technical specs, and it's hard to know what products will actually give you what you need, at the price you want.
Kind of funny...
Except that they just set a death date for my go to whiteboarding app.
It was great to be able to have a dead simple paintbrush level drawing app that was shared in the browser, and I could sketch out on my tablet without dealing with drawing "boxes" and text labels to get an idea across.
Deleted Comment
My best guess would be that the including the cellular chip and paying whoever (Qualcomm ?) holds the licensing fees, doing the qualification etc. is just that prohibitive.
PS：Qualcomm's fees based on the total product price sure won't help: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-qualcomm-licensing-idUSKB...
Are any of these "Chromebook Plus" models better? I don't think so.
[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Lenovo-Ideapad-5i-Gaming-Chromebo...
> In addition to new Chromebook Plus devices, some existing Chromebooks will qualify for an OS update to include the enhanced features found on Chromebook Plus devices in the coming weeks.
> See here for details on eligible devices.[1]
[1] https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/14128000?visit_...
I have a pixel phone. The hardware is impressive. The software is total junk. Everything is designed for to make you into an obsessive-compulsive phone junky. How many stupid alerts and notifications do I need per second. How many ads must I watch? I went back to an iphone despite feeling like the pixel was actually a really good piece of hardware. And an iPhone is not that much better any more.
Deleted Comment
Essentially they have defined "acceptable" performance across the board and given that a name. If I was looking for cheap hardware it ticks the boxes just about. "AI" is just a transparent marketing attempt at throwing a hot buzzword that most people don't understand into the mix.
Not awful but it really could do with a more ambitious tier, a lot of manufacturers will meet the requirements as set out (all laptops shown have 1080p displays, which is disappointing as many chromebooks had better before, 3:2 and 4k displays). We had 16GB chromebook options nearly a decade ago (mar 2015).
In fact I think would have been preferable if they made this the chromebook minimum requirements and called those with less "chromebook lite" ("Go" already served as this I think?); because celeron/4GB/64GB/<1080p display/webcam is really pushing things for a new device in late 2023 onwards, even as a facebook machine.
PS anyone responsible for the chromebook site out there, most of the device information pages are 404'ing; https://www.google.com/chromebook/discover/pdp-asus-chromebo...
Also want to point out high-end Chromebooks are expensive and likely don't sell very well due to its market. So here it is striking a balance. Which is why I won't be buying one of these. But other people will.
My previous experience with low-end intel hardware has been universally negative, so I assumed the i3's are terrible. Passmark says they are far better than I would have guessed:
M1 performance at 4x the wattage.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100
So, either these get hot and are power-outlet-dependent, or they throttle badly.
I wonder if suspend / resume works reliably. It did not for the last 4 intel laptops I owned, regardless of OS. That included Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Maybe the AMD ones are decent. It's a shame about the screen (and bizarre bios) though.
My benchmark is "can this play an HD Youtube video full screen". Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task, but with remote education in the state that it's at, that would make life very hard for its users.
I've also seen laptops go from usable to unusable because everyone switched codecs and suddenly the hardware acceleration didn't work anymore.
I think an i3 with a modest amount of RAM is a good decision for a baseline. You can get away with less, but you'll have to constantly maintain your laptop to do so, tweaking settings as the computer ages and acceleration support dies out. For most people, the device will just slow down to a crawl.
An i3 and 8GB of RAM are technically overspecced today, but in five years time you'll be happy you didn't buy the Celeron.
Most of Google's apps will, come to think of it.
A laptop has to have more.
Try it out in a VM, open 10+ pages from your bookmarks.
Also, a Chromebook is a specifically prepared device with a highly customized Linux OS that is designed to interface very well with Google's services.
Imagine if your iPhone just stored everything in iCloud and didn't need or use much local storage; that's similar to what the original vision of a Chromebook was, and it was pretty successful at that (just ask a good percentage of school-aged children in the United States.)
Obviously, it's not for everyone, but it's probably perfect for a lot of potential use cases, and I know some serious developers exist who actually spend all their time on some of the great Chromebooks that are out there, and they're doing it by choice.
Thanks, not responsible but I've already reported one other 404'ing link to the author and will pass this on too.
Can I run any android app as if it were running on a phone ?
I am specifically thinking of running the 'lyft' app and booking a car ... is that possible ?
But after a few years you can no longer update your web browser.
Why dont I just buy regular Windows laptop then? because they pay Windows tax and often come with weird power hungry choices because windows....
If you want the same battery life without ChromeOS, you need to talk to your preferred Linux distribution vendor and ask them to implement similar features.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892651/chromeos-117-sta...
There are great resources here:
https://mrchromebox.tech
I recently used 3x Dell 5190 and 1x Dell 3100 as touch-capable displays built into wooden cabinets running a Pygame app to communicate with a microcontroller and assorted electronics as part of a science festival booth.
https://justinmiller.io/posts/2023/09/18/wave-caught/
The machines are rugged, have great battery life & durable screens, enough USB ports, space to run plenty of stuff, and I got them for $60 a piece refurbished and guaranteed good screen quality.
Why do you believe this would be the outcome? Good battery life is an attribute of software, not hardware. The likely outcome of slapping Fedora on a Chromebook will be exceedingly poor battery life and prolonged frustration as you attempt to figure out why it doesn't have energy efficiency parity with ChromeOS.
This is even true for phones. For instance, stock GrapheneOS gets 3-4x the battery life of stock Android on my Pixel 6 Pro.
(Graphene can't run many things from the android store until you install Google Play Services. That then reduces the battery life back to stock Android levels, except stuff is buggy. I gave up on using it.)
Deleted Comment
It does everything I need outside of heavier duty programming, and I don't do so much of that in my spare time these days. You can code with it; I set up a for-fun Elixir/Phoenix project that I coded mostly on the Chromebook.
I do a lot of writing/communicating and I don't need anything more than what this computer provides.
Deleted Comment
I feel like these sorts of guarantees used to be useful, but now I'm not sure.
Outside of my work computer, I buy off-lease ThinkPads for use around the home (ie family computers). I think the oldest one still in use is a 3rd generation i7. And it's totally fine as a daily driver.
On the other side, I bought an off-lease desktop that has a 7th gen(?) quad-core 8 thread i7 with 32GB of RAM, and it's not going to allow me to run Windows 11. Kind of silly.
By e-waste here I mean: Perfectly good working hardware that gets an arbitrary EoL solely based on software support.
ChromeOS was of course notable as a laptop OS on both ARM and x86.
I suspect the whole Ultrabook thing kinda fizzled out as it became apparent that ARM was not getting much traction in laptops (other than Apple, but then, they are always an outlier).
It's a great Chromebook for on the go stuff.
What's hurt Chromebook's reputation is people buying discounted/value priced 4Gb ones, struggling with performance and concluding it's a terrible platform.
I'm intellectually curious what the experience of web-based video editing and Photoshop are like for anyone that actually needs to use these tools as part of their repeat workflow.
if they want to help the chromebook's reputation, they should be calling this the minimum spec for a chromebook, and putting "chromebook lite" or similar branding on the ones that don't meet it.
It would be great if they could do that with Chromebooks - follow a minimum spec or otherwise <insert punishment>. Problem is, there isn't anything to hold back or punish with. Which leaves them in a situation where, other than a "made for Chromebook" endorsement that can be withheld, there's nothing to stop anyone making any laptop of any spec and calling it "Chromebook".
Doesn't help that they are made by a company that is now more icky than Microsoft and deservedly so IMO.