Plenty of people already do this with the $250 Chromebook, and even iPad. The $1,299 isn't for the 32GB SSD. It's for the 239ppi 2:3 multitouch Gorilla Glass display. It's for the 4GB of RAM. It's for the dual core Intel i5. It's for the impressively made aluminum chassis. It's for the 1TB of cloud storage. It's for everything a high-end cloud device should be.
If you're logging on to a remote server to do development,you're not taking advantage of the dual core i5 or 4GB of RAM. You're logged into an image that's giving you maybe 1 GHz of CPU and 512MB of RAM. You're buying a $1,300 machine to do development on a $300 machine, over a shitty internet connection.
It depends what you're working on. If you're doing heavy client-side work (e.g. WebGL) then a beefy client is preferable to a beefy server.
I agree though that I probably wouldn't buy this for development work. But I do think that browser's are still better on beefy hardware than on gimped hardware.
But if you also have ~20 tabs open in your browser, and are streaming music etc... I am doing a thin client setup of sorts, and by the end of the day things start slowing down quite a bit.
I do agree that $1300 is too much, at that price range you might as well get a mac. If it was 600-800 i'd probably jump on it. However, I think the curve ball here is the touch screen. I'd be willing to bet that Google's strategy for this laptop is to do a smaller production run, and get these in the hands of tech/programmer types, and then use the lessons learned to develop a model targeted toward a wider audience.
> I'd be willing to bet that Google's strategy for this laptop is to do a smaller production run, and get these in the hands of tech/programmer types
If that's the case, pull an Apple and ship great dev tools on the installation disk. As far as I can tell, there are no top-notch Chrome OS development tools, just various ways to remote into a real machine to do that work.
Pretty sure Square disagrees, and they know what they're talking about when it comes to XCode. See PonyDebugger, a tool they wrote to pipe iOS apps' network connections and debug information through Chrome to take advantage of the developer tools: https://github.com/square/PonyDebugger
Now, you'd never write code in the Chrome Developer Tools (except maybe the occasional one-liner in the REPL). But the Chrome Developer Tools are great — best in class even — for profiling, visualizing, and debugging.
You do for things like WebGL, client-heavy web apps, and other wonderful upcoming web technologies. The point is that this laptop should last you until it physically wears out, not until it becomes obsolete.
I think it might work reverse to this. You don't buy your think client and then figure out how to live with it. Rather, Google is betting that in the future people will be using thin clients and cloud services because of all the other reasons they are attractive.
Once you've already decided you want to live in the cloud, then your question becomes, what is the best possible device I could buy for doing that? And that is what the Pixel is for.
Thin client, thick client, cloud, local, etc, these are all only relevant to technical people. Focus on use-cases. What does the Pixel let you do that a Macbook Pro does not? Have access to all your documents from anywhere (over internet connections of various levels of unreliability?) No, because you can do all that on a Macbook Pro. Does taking away the ability to do things locally improve the user experience in some other way? Arguably, it improves maintainability and makes the UI easier to use.
Is that the target market for the Pixel? People whose main concern is reducing maintenance burden and having an easier to use interface? Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?
> Arguably, it improves maintainability and makes the UI easier to use
When your entire OS is cloud based, I think you get some synergies - you can reliably sit down at any computer and everything "just works" with all your state exactly how you left when you got up from the previous one.
So yes, you could purchase a Mac Pro, but because it's not cloud based from the ground up there are massive gobs of local state such that you continually need to worry about sync'ing things here there and everywhere, installing apps everywhere, etc. So in world where the default thinking for every application is to store local state, removing the capability for local state is necessary to achieve a true thin client.
> Is that the target market for the Pixel? People whose main concern is reducing maintenance burden and having an easier to use interface?
I think that's not really the selling point of this high end machine. This is Google's statement that cloud based computing is better even for people who do demanding, complex tasks (I'm not saying they are right, but I think it's what they believe).
> Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?
As I said, you're underestimating Google's ambition for what can be done with a thin client. An iPad is not suitable for highly intensive desktop tasks at all. A chromebook has all the physical features of a high end professional laptop, but is 100% cloud based, and thus can be used as a real computer for real tasks.
> A chromebook has all the physical features of a high end professional laptop, but is 100% cloud based, and thus can be used as a real computer for real tasks.
Except it can't. There is a theoretical possible future in which everyone has 40 mbps unmetered LTE and powerful apps exist in web form, but if anything the trend has been the opposite in recent years (carriers eliminating unlimited data plans, apps moving back to native on tablets and phones).
Yep, I completely agree - I'm hugely sceptical about whether this future where we can all rely on high speed network access 100% of the time will ever arrive. But I don't think Google is - they are betting this is coming. And in the meantime they are trying to provide just enough local state (HTML5 style) to get you by during the outages.
> Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?
None of the ones who need to write documents and emails, or edit spreadsheets.
For spreadsheets, it's still less than perfect because Google Spreadsheets are still worse than Excel wrt scripting and managing large datasets. But security, ease of use, and lower maintenance burden might make up for it depending on what your needs are. For my parents, this would be perfect.
Unless you wanted the gorgeous 2560x1700 display... Many people have paid close to the whole computer's price just for the screen (I'm typing this on a 2560x1440 screen that I paid $999 for).
I don't see the point of having a pixel density that high; almost no one has sharp enough eyesight to distinguish individual pixels at even lower densities than that, and enough people have poor enough eyesight that they won't be able to read text on software that doesn't scale its fonts properly.
That resolution is appropriate for a monitor with twice the diagonal size.
Also, what's up with the 3:2 aspect ratio? That seems awfully odd.
almost no one has sharp enough eyesight to distinguish individual pixels at even lower densities than that
That's exactly the point. Apple markets its high-PPI displays as being higher-resolution than the human retina[0]. It does need some help from software to not cause usability problems like font scaling and tiny images, but we've had the hardware capability to do this for a while. It's past time we improved on this.
Also, what's up with the 3:2 aspect ratio? That seems awfully odd.
If I had to guess, I bet a lot of the people involved in bringing this machine to market wanted 4:3, but someone in marketing and/or a focus group said that would be perceived as old-fashioned, so they got as close as they felt they could get away with. I'd really like to see a writeup on the reasoning from someone involved though.
[0] I believe the accuracy of said claim is disputed.
> That's exactly the point. Apple markets its high-PPI displays as being higher-resolution than the human retina.
But the resolution doesn't need to be any higher than the maximum resolution of a human retina. By definition, you'd be unable to see the difference; you're just left with the scaling problems of an extremely high resolution on a very small display.
Apple's successive retina devices have decreased in pixels per inch, but have increased in pixels per degree at their intended viewing distance as larger high-PPI devices were introduced. Of course, sometimes people use devices at distances other than those the manufacturer intended, and some people have better eyes than others.
The point is, current high-PPI screens haven't actually banished the pixel from human perception just yet. There are still gains to be made, but they aren't nearly as significant as quadrupling pixel counts over previous devices.
You mean the iPad? I remember the iPhone having a very positive reaction.
As a general rule, most of the time when people say "this is going to be a failure" they are right. The iPad is the exception, not the rule. And Apple has market-making ability that Google can only dream of.
Well, I mean, given that most new product launches and most new business ventures fail, of course the naysayers will be right more often. That doesn't mean they actually have insight into why products fail.
So, that having been said and because this is the internet, I'll rush in with my probably foolish and ill-advised explanation for with this won't be a game changer: In this case, I think the price vs. capabilities will make people compare this unfavorably with other ultrabooks/macbook airs. For the price, there isn't much here that can't be copied, easily, and quickly – and if I really want the cloud connectivity, I can get that on my ultrabook.
What's the unique value proposition in this product? I just don't see it being compelling – except that it's not an Apple product (don't get me wrong, I'm typing this on a Macbook, but I recognize that some people don't like the fruit vendor).
> That doesn't mean they actually have insight into why products fail.
I think it's gut reaction: I wouldn't use this product or recommend it to my friends. I think most of the time, that gut reaction is on point. Sometimes it's wrong, like the iPad, because you don't see the use for it until you try it, but that's the exception.
>Well, I mean, given that most new product launches and most new business ventures fail, of course the naysayers will be right more often. That doesn't mean they actually have insight into why products fail.
