> ChromeOS can do most of the tasks that an everyday Internet user might want.
That's damning with faint praise, isn't it? It can, at this point, do MOST of what an everyday Internet user might want? It's that whole 80/20 thing that everyone thought would let somebody overthrow Microsoft Office -- 80% of users only use 20% of the features. Well that's true and all, but it's not the same 20% for everyone, and you only have to miss one feature to make a Chromebook an untenable alternative to a Windows machine. There was a brief window where Chromebooks were significantly cheaper than a comparable Windows laptop but Intel took the ARM threat seriously, Microsoft took the licensing seriously and now the base Chromebook price from a name manufacturer isn't significantly cheaper than the HP Stream or what have you. "Most" is not going to cut it now that the price advantage is gone.
> There are lots of people who are content with its restrictions.
This is really only true in that we live on a planet with many, many lots of people, and so you can find lots of people for which almost anything holds true if you funnel it down. ChromeOS market share is a rounding error at this point, and if there were any signs that this was turning around, Google apparently decided they weren't enough for them to continue.
Agreed. About a month and a half ago, my grandfather asked me for recommendations on a new computer. I asked him what he needed to do on his computer, and it was looking like a Chromebook (or in his case, more likely a Chromebox) would be perfect, until he mentioned that he runs Quicken. And my mother (an accountant) was emphatic that Quicken Online was no substitute.
Interesting point. I switched to a Mac 10 years ago, and to this day the only software I still fire up a Windows virtual machine for is Quicken. (Quicken Australia never made a Mac version.)
I don't know how old your grandfather is, but Chrome OS is a much better choice than Windows for an elderly person. The sheer power of Windows combined with the most malware of all OSes and unnecessarily frequent UI changes make Windows the very worst OS for the elderly. OS X is better than Windows in this regard, and iOS is better still. Chrome OS is just great for old folks and Chrome OS devices are extremely cost competitive (Chromebooks are cheaper!) with Apple devices.
The comment to which I replied said Quicken Online was no substitute according to the mother. Maybe it's no substitute in sheer power, but still a passable substitute? The elderly benefit from giving up some power in exchange for less system maintenance.
Having an elderly family member struggle to stay up on Windows is super sad to watch and try to help with. I personally definitely wish that I had been more proactive migrating my grandfather to a more locked-down system when he was slightly younger and had a better capacity to adapt.
If the grandfather really is elderly, like older than 75 or 80, I would push in the direction of asking the question "Does he really need Quicken anyway, or maybe he's at a point where he could give up that responsibility, or compromise with Quicken Online?"
I've never met anyone who said it was, so I doubt it. Stop being a blind advocate and realize that some people do need Windows because they need apps that only run on Windows.
It's a trade-off. In my grandpa's case, he would love now to give up Photoshop in exchange for freedom from a litany of Windows nuisances (viruses, registry issues, major UI changes - things many of us forget about that use OS X or Linux). Unfortunately, that ship has sailed; he's 93 now and while not necessarily senile, he has real trouble grokking the cloud and therefore Chrome OS is prohibitively confusing.
When I'm in a pessimistic mood, I can see a day where we return to $4000+ "developer" machines. I think Doctorow wrote about the war on General Purpose Computing. It turns out that developers and power users were casualties in the race to protect users from themselves.
But if you needed to (and had lots of patience…), you could get your whole development stack on a $250 notebook, because there's $250 notebooks with Windows, or where you can install Linux etc.
Granted, it's not as productive (trackpoint or riot!), but it works.
But with the increasing tivoization of computing? Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding? People in developing countries? Poor people in developed countries? Not everyone can afford a 1000€ price tag. Should these people really be excluded from everything that isn't mindless passive consumption?
> Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding?
Simple enough; they'll code on tablets.
I'm actually currently working on a prototype for how a simple, useful development environment might look on a phone or tablet. It's a stack-based concatenative array language with a zoomable user interface. Instead of representing code as lines of text, it takes a more Smalltalk-like approach of a live environment. The benefit of being a concatenative language is that it naturally lends itself to a tree-like format where each word can be viewed and edited on a phone screen. Since semantically it's closer to a weird mashup of J and Perl(!), it can be concise (hopefully still readable) and the vector aspect makes drawing graphics pretty straightforward.
The downside, of course, is that it can be quite hard to reason in. Truthfully, I'm not really sure how to work around that—and I don't think most children will easily think in a function composition/matrix manipulation way. That said, I'd like to find something since I'm fairly sold on the idea that tacit programming with arrays is key to making coding on a tablet work (I think it's fairly clear that imperative or even conventional function languages would be a royal pain to use in such an environment). Maybe something Lisp-like where the user zooms around the AST would be an alternative.
> Poor people in developed countries?
Much cheaper phones and tablets are already vastly more popular than laptops or desktops among poor people. The solution is to move coding forward on mobile, not simply keep rather trashy cheap laptops around.
That's what I was thinking. Off the top of my head (not 100% checking compatability, but with current Newegg prices), to replace my current machine, not counting the 24 inch 1080p monitor (which in my experience last a long time as long as a tornado doesn't throw rocks into them (really)) and keyboard, mouse, etc.:
Supermicro XnSAE workstation motherboard: 215
3.3GHz 4 core Xeon E3-1226 CPU w/HDMI out: 217
32 GiB DDR3 1600 ECC Kingston memory: 240
Low end 1/3 w/year for 5 years data center 80GB Intel SATA SSD: 100
Seagate "enterprise" <550/TB/year 4 TB hard disk: 210
982 USD plus shipping plus whatever enclosure, power supply, high quality fans etc. you put into it, which ought not go over $200 new. E.g. after discovering a Lian-Li enclosure I love I bought 3 more and cycle through them.
Plus backup, however you do that (make sure critical stuff is offsite!). And, say, a man-week of your time to configure, order, build, install and configure Linux. The result will be very fast and rock solid (well, if put behind a good UPS) workstation class machine with a 5 year design life.
I think it's just a matter of time for that trend of exclusively mobile/dumb devices to start reversing especially as phones/tablets increase in processing power. Canonical already showed us it is possible to run both Android and a full desktop OS on the Android kernel years ago[1], MS Surface tablets are basically laptops without a fixed hinge between the keyboard and screen.
I see at least one clear profit motive for the industry here, let's say you have a "Desktop enabled, smart" smartphone, you'll probably want to buy a dock, screen, keyboard, mouse, productivity software, etc.
While maybe this won't always be the case, the current chromeOS structure allows for arbitrary code, you just have to enable a development mode. The process for doing that is well documented. I don't have a problem with a computer that comes restricted as long as there is a documented process for un-restricting it. Same reason I don't find SIP in OS X or Secure Boot a problem. Security features are good as long as they are configurable.
Right, that's a problem. I fully agree with you on that. I just think it's important that fight for the right thing. Secure Boot isn't the problem. In fact, most people probably should leave it on because it's a good security feature. It is absolutely critical that these features work for users and not against them though.
Funny you should mention Microsoft Windows. As I understand it, the phone OS is now unified with tablet and desktop - but you still can't run anything but windows on a windows phone. I don't expect them to offer up the driver source code (all though that would be nice) - but an open boot loader would be a start.
I suppose it's no surprise. It goes something like this: a) underwrite the device (not necessarily lose money on every sale, just lower the margins), b) introduce an app store, c) take a cut of every transaction.
As long as users and developers need your OS, your device - your appstore - you will make money.
> Once below-1000€-laptops/desktops disappear in favour of oversized tablets, how are children going to learn coding?
There's plenty of free, on-device code editor, compiler/interpreter, etc. apps for Android, including ones that will allow you to run code in the app, or build, package, and install (given that you've enable non-Store installation) Android apps right on the device.
I think there is a difference in not wanting to buy a cheap laptop because of build/hardware quality, and not being able to buy a cheap laptop because it won't let you run arbitrary code. One's a choice you make because you have the money to afford a nicer laptop. The other makes it even harder for the less fortunate to understand computers.
How is a locked down tablet/laptop in any way similar to a computer with a built-in compiler/interpreter and a full hw schematic available in the manual?
I don't remember getting any compiler or interpreter for Amiga, Atari or Apple Mac. You had to pay for them and the schematics were part of the OS SDK, also commercial.
Also going besides the ROM BASIC or Forth meant buying a compiler/interpreter.
I know the Amiga manuals (Amiga 2000) was very well documented, a friend fixed ours by measuring the various documented points on the main board, finding a poorly soldered component or fried transistor (I forget the details).
AFAIK Arexx was part of Worbench? But yes, you did need to get a compiler/interpreter for that. I thought you were talking about stuff like the C64 generation of computers.
I remember there were GNU tools available for the Amiga, and some magazines came with various development tools -- eg: Blitz Basic. But most were certainly commercial (including Blitz Basic) - but one must consider that even with aminet - there was nothing like the essentially free distribution of today (eg: push to github).
According to this site, Amiga Basic was actually bundled with the machine (note-section: "bundled basic language interpreter (free with machine)"):
> > There are lots of people who are content with its restrictions.
Much of the use of ChromeOS and ChromeBooks is in education (where they compete with Macs and iPads), where the buyers are not the users, and the restrictions are actually part of the appeal. It's a decent niche I guess, it's just that but when I see some of the newer Chromebooks with Core-i5 processors, I can't but feel it's a waste of horsepower.
What you're saying flies in the face of the growing evidence that many people are happy with a computing device (phone, tablet) that can't do everything, but can do a lot.
I bought my mom a Chromebook and she loves it. I think the group of users who are willing and able to do all their computing tasks inside a browser window is larger than you think.
That's damning with faint praise, isn't it? It can, at this point, do MOST of what an everyday Internet user might want? It's that whole 80/20 thing that everyone thought would let somebody overthrow Microsoft Office -- 80% of users only use 20% of the features. Well that's true and all, but it's not the same 20% for everyone, and you only have to miss one feature to make a Chromebook an untenable alternative to a Windows machine. There was a brief window where Chromebooks were significantly cheaper than a comparable Windows laptop but Intel took the ARM threat seriously, Microsoft took the licensing seriously and now the base Chromebook price from a name manufacturer isn't significantly cheaper than the HP Stream or what have you. "Most" is not going to cut it now that the price advantage is gone.
> There are lots of people who are content with its restrictions.
This is really only true in that we live on a planet with many, many lots of people, and so you can find lots of people for which almost anything holds true if you funnel it down. ChromeOS market share is a rounding error at this point, and if there were any signs that this was turning around, Google apparently decided they weren't enough for them to continue.