“Sure enough, a product listing provides a lot more detail about the tiny Chrome OS desktop than Samsung gave us in January, including its use of a 1.9GHz, dual-core Celeron B840, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a 16GB solid-state drive and six (not five) USB ports. We haven’t seen mention of the promised wireless keyboard and mouse bundle, although the retailer’s configuration might reflect a stripped-down trim level: at $330, it’s a lot less than the $400 we were quoted at the start of the year.” A $400 ChromeOS desktop box? Good luck with that.
Born dead.
Shouldn’t Google subsidize these? since they are getting all that cloud information to analize.
The Chromebox reminds me of the flop that was the Chromebook – overpriced kit that can do less than an equivalent rival device running a normal desktop setup with tne Chrome browser.
I’ll stick with the Acer Revo 3700 I’m typing this on – 500GB internal hard drive, Nvidia ION 2 graphics, 6 USB ports, wireless keyboard/mouse, VESA mountable, HDMI and VGA, optical SPDIF, SD card slot, microphone/headphone sockets, 4GB RAM, dual core 64-bit Atom CPU and can be found for less than the Chromebox.
Slap on Ubuntu 12.04 and XBMC and you’ll have a far better desktop on the Revo than the Chromebox!
Edited 2012-05-22 23:55 UTC
4GB of Memory seems a bit much for what’s basically a browser kiosk, isn’t it?
I know some people tend to have a lot of stuff open, but I’ve run multiple tabs on (albeit an older version of) Chromium + an entire Linux OS behind it on an old 32bit Pentium Dual Core + 1GB RAM without the system needing to reach for the swap partition.
Visit http://ro.me/ and you might just have an answer for that
Even with a recent memshrunk Firefox nightly (dev channel) it peaks over 1.5GB of memory in use.
Those who speak ill of ChromeOS machines and think they aren’t worth it have never tried one. No matter what laptop/desktop you compare it to, ChromeOS is faster… The boot and awake response times are amazing. While I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro, MacOS is a dog sometimes (like connecting to my work Wifi sometimes just messes it up). ChromeOS machines connect to wifi without problems all the time every time.
Yes, they are a little pricy, but with automatic updates, you don’t have to pay for OS updates and while my Chromebook runs Ubuntu as well, ChromeOS is just smoother when doing internet things.
Also, it’s a little short sighted to discount them as well, cause everything is moving to the cloud (including enterprises — who google is targeting with these devices).
Uh wrong, all the Chromebooks where overpriced crap using very outdated surplus Atom hardware with the worst possible chipset/IGP, the Pineview chipset, with the GMA 3150 which is only 2 fixed function Pixel Pipelines at only 200Mhz with OpenGL2.1 support and only MPEG2 acceleration in hardware.
If they had used something more modern like at least a 5.9w AMD Z-01 APU http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bobcat/AMD-Z%20Series%20Z-01…. which would have been at least 2x more CPU grunt, a real dual core 64 bit CPU and something like 4x the GPU performance as well as full acceleration of every format up to H.264 all with much lower power consumption so the battery life would have been better.
The hardware was never up to the task that the target market wanted to do with them, their Youtube vids pegged the CPU, if they wanted to play any browser games the best they could hope to play is QuakeLive, anything heavier would max out the GPU.
People want something that can handle full HD video and play HTML5 WebGL games at a bare minimum and anything more then around $300 for something cat can only do just that is just too much since for $50 more you can get decent hardware that can handle those tasks and many more since they come with a full blown OS.
Also, “the cloud” is a lie, trusting your data to an advertiser’s server is just as dumb as trusting their OS and Browser to not send them every little thing you’ve ever typed on the damn thing, as someone else stated, they should be paying you to use them since they’re going to sell the data.
Edited 2012-05-23 05:10 UTC
WTF?!
Last February I got Asus 1215B with Linux pre-installed,
from Amazon Germany, around 300€.
ChromeOS is a toy OS and with these type of prices, it is already dead.