Exactly. ChromeOS is not for such powerful machines, because the OS itself is not powerful. So ChromeOS with a $1000 machine is far from a perfect match (at least it isn't yet, maybe 5-10 years from now).
But right now ChromeOS is and should be for light web machines. And I've said it many times before. There's absolutely no reason for Chromebooks to use x86 chips. I've said Google will almost surely mess up the pricing of Chromebook Pixel because they never seem to understand how to price a new product.
Maybe if they would've made a quad core Cortex A15 machine with this display and for $500, that would've been a little more attractive - although for people just looking for browsing the web, there was no need for such a high resolution anyway. Just keep Chromebooks at $250 and use ARM in them, and get to that 10h battery life.
Why pay $1,299 for a thin client OS even if it's running thick client hardware? I can run a browser and so much more in a macbook air or thinkpad in the same price range.
> companies build screens with more code friendly aspect ratios
I hear this complaint a lot and I think it's based on a flawed premise.
Taller aspects might be better on very small screens that only fill tiny portions of your vision but on bigger screens -- the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer -- you want wider not taller. It's the only way to usefully use your field of view. This is why wider aspects exist.
On my 16:9 aspect 27" desktop screen, my vision is practically filled in the vertical direction -- it is easier to glance to the horizontal edges than the vertical ones. I would use more horizontal space before I used more vertical.
And this is the point of wider aspects -- they use your eyes better. If you buy three screens for your desktop, you don't stack them vertically -- you arrange them horizontally so you can actually see them.
People who keep asking for squarer displays for work should simply get bigger displays and stop pretending that a 13" laptop display is ever a good choice for a working display.
Frankly, anything sub 24" is not a working environment. Anything smaller is either (a) something you use occasionally when you're not at your desk or (b) for people who are not working.
> the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer
Could you go into more detail on this? I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous. Basically, if there's some kind of ergonomics concern I'm prepared to change, but not otherwise.
> wider aspects -- they use your eyes better
Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing.
> Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing.
It's true that in reading, we're only good at scanning approximately 8-10 words per line. This is why letters are the width that they are. But I'm not talking about making a single document fill the width of the screen. That document behavior is a relic of a small-screened world.
Modern computer working environments (particularly programming) generally involve opening a few different documents simultaneously and having them open side-by-side. Multiple editors, browser windows, debug tools, documentation, file-trees, etc. This all needs to go somewhere. It is easier to place these separate documents side-by-side than stacked vertically.
> I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous.
Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window but if you've ever wanted to edit two documents side-by-side there's little you can do on a screen that small. You're pigeonholing yourself into a mono-tasking environment because you don't have the real-estate to present multiple documents simultaneously.
> Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window
No, neither of these things are the case. I'm currently working with Xcode, Blender, terminals and a debug app, as well as my internet distractions, and it's not slow. I do make heavy use of virtual desktops and cmd-tab, and when I was working on a dual-screen workstation I found that most of my work centred on a single screen because I would rather move the app than scan the screen. For me at any rate, a large spatial organisation is visual clutter, and lends itself to hunting for information, whereas the apparent bottleneck of cmd-tab actually sorts information efficiently.
I'm not sure if this is making sense, I'm going down with a cold and focus has gone out of the window in quite a different sense today, but there's my 2c.
May be true for desktops, but if you have ever tried to code on a 1366x768 14" laptop display, you'll agree.
8:5/16:10 or even 3:2 fill the horizontal field of view well while also delivering more vertical space.
Even if 16:9 is theoretically better, why shouldn't we have a choice? Every notebook computer out there besides Apple has a 16:9 display, and I'm sick of it, and many others are as well. At least offer us more than one choice.
I use Visual Studio on a 1360x768 display all the time, and it's not so bad. It does encourage writing the code better because you can't read large chunks at once.
I heard a story where one famous computer scientist (Dijkstra, McCarthy, Hoare, or Knuth?) said something about how using punch cards encourages writing code better because the compile/debug loop is so long and annoying.
> companies build screens with more code friendly aspect ratios
Let's hope Lenovo takes a look at this. I'd love a Thinkpad with a high-res screen, 3:2 display, and of course, the venerable TrackPoint and keyboard. Touchscreen is a nice novelty feature but really isn't required.
> I'll take any steps in the direction of square as positive
If someone proposes a Kickstarter project for a mobile developer workstation with a solid design, 4:3 high-res screen, pointing stick, and great keyboard, I'll be the first to hop on.
Or maybe I should go ahead and make that Kickstarter project a reality instead of waiting for someone to.
Dell Precision Mobile Workstation M6700? It's got a pointing stick and a decent keyboard, high res 17" screen (although, widescreen), solid construction, etc.
I couldn't agree more. I'm currently on an upgraded Thinkpad T61p with 1680x1050 and I'm reluctant to change it to a newer machine because of the 16:9 screens padded with tall plastic border that are available in most notebooks nowadays.
I really hope that hardware makers will finally realize that the primary reason for buying a notebook is not for watching movies on a 15" screen.
Did you know you can put a 14" standard-aspect T61 motherboard in a 15" T60p chassis with a 1600x1200 IPS panel? Did you know that if you want to spend $400 or so, or you're really good at shopping on ebay, you can upgrade that to 2048x1536?
What I want is as many vertical pixels as possible; this is the first new screen I've seen that's got more than my 10-year-old CRT (1536).
(At this point some wag is going to suggest portrait mode, but I've never seen a laptop with a portrait screen that can be used at the same time as the keyboard).
Because there's no space / it would be too small. We're talking about sub-15" display here. So while wide display is great in 22"+, it sucks for everything (except movies maybe) on smaller devices.
I don't especially want a single tall, thin window for code. 5:4 is still wider than it is tall. My usual development environment is Emacs with two panes (Emacs calls them windows for historical reasons) side by side on 4:3.
My thinking is that a screen that's close to square works better for a wider range of tasks than one that's very oblong. A rotating oblong screen that could be tall or wide might work nicely for a lot of situations too, but it would be hard to implement well on a laptop.
This has a far better screen than either of those objectively and a more preferable aspect ratio for many of us subjectively. Installing arbitrary Linux distributions on Chromebooks has been trivial in the past and almost certainly remains so with this one. Many people here would install their Linux distribution of choice on whatever laptop they bought anyway, so the shipping OS is a non-issue.
I'm ready. I realise some people aren't, but I'm young with good vision; "microscopic" is exactly what I want. I'm buying the extra pixels so I can fit more on my screen, not so I can fit the same stuff with better-rounded edges.
I'd argue that Unity looks much, much better on high DPI. I run it on an old crappy 1024x768 and a newer 1920x1080 of around the same size, and the icons/launcher actually look sane at almost double the DPI of the older screen. Unity makes the low-DPI computer look (and feel) like a toy, but I like it a lot on my new computer.
I'd agree with you if you're running Gnome 2, or KDE, though.
I own a Series 5 chromebook. It's hands down the worst machine I've ever owned. I really wanted to like it, too. My issue is that I tried to use it for stuff like reddit, youtube, and whatnot, and because it has no swap space it would just kill background tabs once I had more than 3 or so open. Basically it's a machine built for browsing the web, but because of the way I (and possibly others) use the web it's not useful for that purpose.
I have to put in a good word for the Samsung here. My wife's MacBook finally died, so she got a ChromeBook as a stop-gap, but in reality, it's really all she needs for basic surfing, Google Docs/Drive and watching CBS streaming (for stuff not on Hulu/Roku/NetFlix).
It's cheap, adequately quick, easy to use and has all-day battery life, and charges up at night with the iPad and iPhone used by my toddler.
I'll grant you that if you only do one thing at a time, it works all right. I just tend to jump around a lot -- I use Tree Style Tab for Firefox just to figure out how I got somewhere -- and the Chromebook is a really bad machine for that purpose.
I doubt the Chromebook was ever designed for people like us. We demand far more from our technology and multitask in ways the average user simply doesn't. My Android tablet is nice, but I can't even open up 10+ new tabs at once on a whim and let them all load in the background without it dying.
And forget having them all loaded where I left them when I next return to Chrome.
A friend of mine once put it that if you're the kind of person that thinks a Chromebook is neat, you're not the target market for a Chromebook. I think you and he are both right. The only reason I even attempted it is because I damaged my Series 9 so much that it wouldn't start, so for a few months I just used what I had.
The use case that most people cite when they say that they're developing on a chrome machine is to use it as a dumb SSH terminal to their actual development machines. So they're not going to benefit from the higher performance, because all the heavy lifting is being done elsewhere.
Modern doesn't mean "in use". I haven't seen much more than proof of concepts and demos when it comes to those technologies. Feel free to point out real-world uses if there are any that could benefit me.
Yes you are missing something. Processor performance is not simply a function of number of cores and clock speed. There are vast differences between arm's architecture and x86.
Actually comparing Arm versus x86 is really like comparing apples to oranges. One is RISC, other is CISC. One is good with running multiple threads on single core with highly sophisticated branch prediction, other concentrates having many low powered cores each hoarding threads. And this is very, very crude simplification.
Benchmarks tend to be always favor other camp, depending which attributes you are testing.
Actually Intel chips are since long RISC based, with a CISC translation layer. The real difference is in the more advanced pipeline, prediction and cache and and of course the 32 vs 64 bit + other architectural features. Hence the intel chips use a lot more power than an ARM based processor.
This is not exactly true. In most cases intel's chips are more power hungry but the low power atom processors bring better performance than an ARM cortex A9 while still having lower power consumption. (mostly by racing to sleep faster) And this is a three year old architecture i'm talking about.
Build your own benchmark. Measure whatever you want to do. Or if you insist on standardized testing, use something like SPECInt 2006. Results here: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2013q1/ (sadly no ARM results). Of course that is only for integer calculations, if you need fp, use SPECfp.
I don't see how being CISC rather than RISC results in any inherit advantage. "The CISC approach attempts to minimize the number of instructions per program, sacrificing the number of cycles per instruction. RISC does the opposite, reducing the cycles per instruction at the cost of the number of instructions per program."
But right now ChromeOS is and should be for light web machines. And I've said it many times before. There's absolutely no reason for Chromebooks to use x86 chips. I've said Google will almost surely mess up the pricing of Chromebook Pixel because they never seem to understand how to price a new product.
Maybe if they would've made a quad core Cortex A15 machine with this display and for $500, that would've been a little more attractive - although for people just looking for browsing the web, there was no need for such a high resolution anyway. Just keep Chromebooks at $250 and use ARM in them, and get to that 10h battery life.