Raspberry Pi makes products like this completely obsolete. I see nothing here worth paying an order of magnitude more money for. Google seems to have a really bad habit lately of building products that nobody wants.
The Raspberry Pi is targeted squarely at enthusiasts (which, granted, is probably most people here).
It comes without an operating system, any storage, a case, or even a power supply. This is a huge, if not insurmountable, barrier to entry for a large portion of the population.
The Chromebox is a turnkey, plug in power, plug in TV, surf the web product. They couldn't be more dissimilar.
Just a quick note: The biggest piece of feedback I got from a journo friend of mine who just reviewed this chromebox is actually that out of the box it won't do HDMI or VGA (without buying an adapter separately that is), which seemed odd to me (and to him) given being easy to connect to a TV seems like a big use case for the chromebox.
>out of the box it won't do HDMI or VGA (without buying an adapter separately that is)
Some DVI ports can send VGA signals, in which case it would just be a matter of getting a cable with DVI pins on one end and VGA pins on the other.
In other words, the DVI spec contains a VGA-compatible part and an HDMI-like part so that a single DVI port can send VGA signals or HDMI-like "DVI-D" (DVI digital) signals.
Moreover, DVI-HDMI cables are common although some DVI ports cannot provide audio to go along with the video and others cannot speak the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection protocol.
At the very least - theres _lot_ more RAM on board the Chrome Box, theres a "16G hard drive" (presumably ssd/flash?), there 6 usb ports, there's a power supply built in, bluetooth onboard, and there's a nice (enough) case wrapping it all up.
For _some_ people that's not worth ~$280, but there's not very many "general public" who're planning on plugging a RaspberryPi into their TV as part of their home entertainment system.
I see nothing here worth paying an order of magnitude more money for.
Simplicity? I am very much willing to pay for a simple device that requires close to no support and maintenance. And I’m sure this is quite a common sentiment among people who have to service their relatives’ computers – huge, complex machines used mostly just to browse the web.
