I think price is the real key. If it's around the $200 mark, I'll probably even pick one up for surfing while sitting on the couch or toilet.
My grandparents need/want a laptop, and literally all they'll ever use it for is to google stuff. They'll possibly want to upload pictures from their digital camera they never use, but if that's made simple via USB and some cloud based service (existing or otherwise), then this device would be perfect for them. <$300 and I'd get them a chrome laptop. >$300 and I'd get them a cheap windows laptop. My wife is using a $349 toshiba full sized laptop right now, and it does everything she needs. But if I could save them $100 or so on one of these, that would definitely be the way I'd go.
Another important feature if you or your non-techie friends and family value your time is the protection from malware recovery and other sysadmin tasks.
But you could likely get a cheap Windows netbook for nearly the same price, as OEM Windows 7 Starter will cost ~$40 OEM. So rather than $200 you pay pay $240, but you also get the ability to run Office, iTunes, FireFox, hook up printers, scanners, cameras. etc...
Is this worth an extra $40? It feels like it is, even if I rarely use any of these features. But there's probably also some value in being able to say, "This device is only for the cloud, period". But I feel like I'd rather get a tablet device (the Nook Color is already a mere $249).
It's hard to believe a stateless box can be hard to manage. There isn't much to go wrong in it. At least, not when compared to a barebones Windows netbook.
Support and managing state are two different things.
For friends and family, the support I provide is almost never about state or ramifications of state. The most common set of questions are actually around printing (why does it print the webpage name at the bottom of the page? I don't want that. Or the computer says it's out of ink, but I just put new ink in it). Chrome just complicates this.
The next biggest set of issues is hooking up the laptop to TVs. Nobody did this a year ago, and this holiday season I've already gotten like three calls on how to do this.
Windows and MacOS have gotten sufficiently mature that a lot of the old issues just don't come up any more (or we've past that stage where there were a lot of adult complete computer neophytes... even my parents are decade old computer users now).
Why would ChromeOS complicate tasks like page setup? It seems printing is somewhat different (not sure - I haven't used a Cr-48 yet) but it can't possibly be so complicated my mother (an archetypal 75 year-old lady) would have problems. About a month ago, I set her up with a USB printer (I took away my networked printer), Ubuntu detected it immediately when plugged. No driver download, no nothing. It all just worked.
Anyway, if page setup and connecting external screens are your worst problems, consider yourself very lucky. Most of us have to deal with the occasional malware infection (luckily, I don't). The horror stories are often amusing.
Fortunatley, I've only had one malware infection amongst friends and family, and it was on the Amiga -- where I'd inadvertantly infected my neighborhood with an infected disk. Felt like a jerk.
I ran w/o any virus protection until about 2005 on a PC and never got any malware. Lucky? Maybe, but I see so little malware amongst "my users" that I wonder where the ruckus comes from. In any case, I do now have everyone on MS Security Essentials.
ChromeOS doesn't complicate page setup, but it printing. With printing you need to have a "server" computer hooked up to the printer. Now there are issues around the other computer being turned on, and diagnosing issues at the host computer rather than at the machine their doing the print job from. Basically take every problem you have today, but then add another computer in the middle.
In my extended social circle there are two groups with observably higher computer problem frequency: the teens and the seniors. The teens are heavy gamers, prefer Windows and frequent all the worst places of the net. The seniors exchange an astonishing volume of PowerPoint presentations and click on every link they get by e-mail. Both groups have their computers rebuilt ever 6 months or so. Not only because of malware, but performance issues that appear to make the machines unbearably slow (maybe due to installing two or three smiley-making extensions to their IM clients)
Actually, I have, and it's perfectly adequate if you're using a netbook as a netbook. (The biggest number of Windows complaints I see on the eeeuser.com forums involve people who have 64-bit driver problems, for example.)
I mean, if you're comparing running a Chrome browser under Windows 7 Starter with running the Chrome "OS" on top of Linux, it seems to me the biggest difference will be the option of persistent storage, not the polish of the user experience.
That said, I have two netbooks and both are dual-booting Windows 7 Starter and Ubuntu 10.10 desktop.
Agreed: and I think the ultimate target market is the enterprise space (rather than the grandparents) where a company wants to get a lot of employees mobile and online quick and cheap without security risk or proprietary software costs
I agree on the price point, although it's not clear how you could get to that price point -- ditching the Windows tax doesn't buy you that much.
I think the biggest problem I have with it is that -- barring a revolutionary cheap price point -- there seems to be no Unique Selling Proposition or compelling use case that distinguishes it from the capabilities of existing netbooks.
The hardware will be cheaper. These things run on ARM processors and a free Linux kernel / firmware. With a few OEMs on board, I think that it's absolutely feasible to see these things around $99 - (perhaps free if paired with Wireless carrier and a data contract)
Think about that for a second: A $99 'laptop' that you don't need to worry about upgrading or going out of date like a regular PC, that has a much longer battery life, is lighter, smaller, and 'just works' for it's intended purpose better than a PC.
It sounds nuts, but after having used one of these for the last week, I am more convinced than ever that Microsoft/Intel is in big trouble unless they do something pretty radical and perhaps painful to their immediate existing business.
*edit -- I've just read that Cr-48 runs Atom. I was told it was an ARM chip. Certainly the chipset requirements factor into my argument here.
Yep, from the beta samples it appears they're using commodity hardware, so the only savings will be the Windows tax. Basically, if you took the original Asus 701 netbook and made some upgrades (7" -> 12" screen; 600 MHz Centrino -> 1.6 GHz Atom; 500 MB -> 2 GB RAM; 4 GB -> 16 GB flash drive) you'd have the Cr-48 specs.
Asus differentiates its wide range of netbooks with price point variations based on different battery specs, hard drive size, Bluetooth, etc.
The only variation I can see for commercial roll-out would be in, say, the 3G module added by a particular service provider. Given what has happened with the added "features" of some Android devices, I'm not sure that a Verizon-specific Chromebook would be a big seller. A vendor-specific would seem to lead to contracts and account personalization details that would kill the anonymity focus of the device.
But, How are they going to reach that price point? Specially since they are not going to produce them, and at least this model is pretty ordinary hardware(runs an Atom, not an ARM CPU). And, why manufacturers would want to canibalize their already tight margins on netbooks?
Besides, most people I know, would pay 100$ for the ability of running a "real" OS.
Because it needs 3G connectivity to be usefull.
The people charging you $40/month (really $100) for a 3year contract will be happy to subsidize a $200 unit
