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Yeah, I'm convinced for $35 US.

Raspberry Pi with Chrome OS, that might not be bad. I wouldn't pay as much for a chromebook or box as I would for a machine that's capable of running Fedora. Raspberry Can run Fedora as well, but at the low price point It might be nice to just have a dumb terminal.

I think Fry explains my opinion on that idea well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQCP85FngzE

A not very powerful ARM CPU, plus only 256MB of RAM, plus a (slow) SD card (and you need to swap a lot because of the small RAM) for ChromeOS?

Ahem, your definition of "not bad" is interesting, I would say most probably slow as a snail myself..

Edited 2012-05-30 11:32 UTC

Form my understanding, its a web browser operating system. If the cloud is doing the storing, management, and manipulation of my work, I would think the os wouldn't need that much power. If it does, then I'm out on the whole Chrome OS concept.

Yes and web browsers are not especially efficients..


If it is done this way then you're correct, it could work, but I find that modern webbrowser can be very resource intensive.

IMHO Google agree: they put 4GB of RAM in the Chromebook, so, I doubt that a Raspberry Pi with 256MB would be very useful: I know a website which use 300MB of RAM(!) (probably a bug in the website as it's just a blog).

I think I need to write a plugin for all of the browsers I use to block 300 mb websites. I remember being ticked off that I wrote code that generated a 1 mb file. Its painful moving from embedded work to web :/

In the times of 70s/80s micros, 1 MiB file would irk many.

Just progress, I guess...

I'm not sure that's fair... not inefficient, just forced to do things in a particular way (from the way WWW developed over the past 2 decades) - within those constraints, efficiency does matter (witness improvement in js over the past few years)


I'd guess one of horrible blog comments systems (like Disqus) is the probable perpetrator... or maybe erring usage of translucency & heavy image backgrounds, this also tends to have heavy resource impact, it seems.

Well since Chrome OS is about the browser ...it doesn't really need any less resources than Chrome (which, like any modern browser, isn't strictly only about "the cloud is doing the storing, management, and manipulation" - a lot happens locally in js, then there are such heavyweight modern improvements(?) as WebGL)

And try running Chrome (or Chromium OS) on a Pentium II 300 MHz ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs "Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2") with 256 MiB of RAM...

Give me a smaller SSD, a thiner body and a ARM SOC and take $250 less from me and I am convinced.

Google really needs to get the ARM port rolling.

Generally, yes. They may switch to ARM SoCs after they smooth out the bugs in the Android port.

Well, ChromeOS is way more than just Chrome. The Android port will help, but ARM has so much more potential so they should take this way more serious.

I always thought when A15 ARM chips are available Google would release ChromeOS to an wider audience.

Why the hell aren't there some really cheap Chinese OEMs who crank out $200 Chromebooks? Eric always said these things are supposed to be really cheap.

Google seems to target larger institutions with that hardware, at least that's what I understand from their offers (subscription option, support contract).

Institutional customers will prefer the unified hardware (ie. tested platform, simple to replace), automatic updates with quality controls on exactly that hardware, recovery mechanisms from boot (it's really hard to kill the software side of these devices) over setting up things themselves, even at a $150 premium. The selling point is "barely any (or 'no') administration required" (the cloud promise, in hardware).

Custom ChromiumOS builds won't provide this.

I think Google targets these customers because it's easier to work with them to get feedback (there's generally more patience in an institution than in a private customer), easier to provide support for (there is _some_ support infrastructure on the customer end), and a more clearly defined scope (institutions can define a-priori what use cases they have, so they'll know if a ChromeBox is a good match).

Once Google gained confidence with this part of the market I'd expect them to push into the personal computing market (and adapt volume and pricing accordingly).

tl;dr: These systems aren't for endusers yet, so they don't need enduser pricing at this time.

Yeah, but did they have success selling this to any institution yet?

Do they even use them internally at Google? I mean, on a wide scale, not just the ChromeOS team eating its own dog food?

I don't think that Google Docs is at the point where it could replace MS Office for most workers/students at large institutions. If they get it to the point where its as good as libreoffice, then they have a chance to take market share from the traditional Linux Desktop at large corporations.

That's so stupid. Any business model that relies on simultaneously withholding and selling information is eventually going to get devoured by the internet.

I also don't.

In no way I am going to give money for a computer that works only with Internet, and where I am limited in my choice of applications to use.

I work mainly offline, with old good native applications, that only use Internet if I want them to.

I am excited for this... It means my mother-in-law can have a computer that does only what she needs it to do....mainly gmail and facebook.

Considering MS departure from the desktop theme what would you prefer? These is a slick device competing with the Macbook style but costs a fraction of its price.

Oh yes, that is exactly how I choose my devices, based on their style.

Thank you for sharing this with us... ;p

But many enough do choose like that.