Yeah this for sure. We've been stuck with 1080p for so long.
It's retarded to think that in the late 1990s we had 1600x1200 CRTs at 120hz and great color quality. Now it's almost 15 years later and 120hz isn't even main stream, color quality is worse and we traded some vertical for horizontal resolution.
Part of the price is paying for the google drive allotment. That's great but I would rather have the local storage which I can get access to anywhere vs the cloud storage that I might not be able to reach.
For me the one thing that eats up space is my virtual machines for software testing. The other big driver is iMovie for editing videos, but I am sure I could do that elsewhere.
Anything I might want to work on. My dev tools and repos + assets from other team members exceed 64GB of space. The only place I have enough bandwidth to work over the network is at home. A device that's primary function is a network device doesn't work where I'm at due to limited connectivity, data caps etc.
So basically it's a ticking bomb waiting to go in the trash. At that price, no way.
SSD's do fail, sometimes by accident, sometimes by software bugs. Some muppet added a swap partition to one of our build servers with a Samsung 830 and the cells were all worn out dead in 3 months from swapping.
I speculate to what extent this is a deliberate feature.
You are forced to keep proprietary resources (data, code, etc.) in "the cloud". Which is precisely what many businesses want. They don't want information floating around on individual machines, potentially un-backed-up and inaccessible to the business.
Replacing the occasional machine with a bad SSD is a minor inconvenience, by comparison.
See it from the business's perspective, not the individual's.
P.S. Yes, there is a contrary fear of relying on a third party for storage and security (and continued accessibility). But... Google doesn't have that concern WRT deploying this to their own workforce. And... giving it too much consideration doesn't sell their own services (Google Apps, Drive, etc.). And I still don't think Google really wants to be in the hardware business as a primary product and revenue stream.
Oh, and... have your own "cloud", to whatever degree. Google can sell that, too. (It has already, to various agencies of the U.S. Federal government.)
I know you shouldn't have to on a laptop with that price - but Sandisk Extreme Pro SD cards are pretty damn quick and would make a decent expansion. Assuming you don't need the slot for other reasons.
Having expansion via an SD card is nice but it's really just too small for what they are charging. I get that it comes with a big chunk of google drive space for three years but it's just not convenient/realistic for me or anyone I know to be tied to cloud storage.
Huh? If some random guy didn't do something to make himself popular (considering he's really smart, if he didn't make Linux he would have still probably done something else massive) how would he be a troll?
Your comment makes no sense... considering the only reason you/hn/whoever even reads his posts is because he's the Linux guy. If he wasn't nobody would even read it, and you can't troll nothing lol.
I'd consider it too, if not for the size of the drive.
Right now, unless something with a >1080p screen comes out, the ThinkPad Helix (https://www.lenovo.com/products/us/tablet/thinkpad/thinkpad-...) will probably remain on the top of my list for when the warranty on my current laptop runs out. At least it has 1080p on a 12" screen, rather than making me choose between a 720p I don't mind carrying and a 1080p boat anchor.
On any modern OS, resolution and text size have little to do with each other. If you can't see anything, turn up the DPI to match the actual DPI of your display, and any well-behaved application will become readable.
I don't know about Chrome, but you can fix that misfeature in Firefox with a hidden preference, and tell it to actually respect the system DPI setting. Just go to about:config and set layout.css.dpi to 0.
It seems that Linus was praising the screen of Chromebook Pixel particularly its resolution. Sorry if I am being ignorant here, but has Linus heard of Retina Display MacBook Pro? rMBP has roughly the same PPI as Google Chromebook Pixel and had been available for almost a year by now. And surely you can install Linux on it. *[1]
There used to be some high-res laptops(compared to what's popular today)at non-16:9 aspect ratios. Anyone remember the IBM T21? 1400x1050 (14.1")... in '00-01! I guess a combination of waning consumer demand due to OMG WIDESCREEN and corner-cutting brought 1366x768 to the forefront. Also, it's kind of funny that 1366x768 is not actually 16:9 anyway.
I went through all the links HN'ers have posted in this thread and I couldn't find the information so I have to beg the question:
_Does it have a good keyboard??_
(Laptop keyboards seem to become worse as the years go on -- with the exception of macbooks and possibly Thinkpads -- and I'm really hoping that the Chromebook Pixel has a respectable keyboard)
Some of the pictures on Google's site seem to suggest a macbook-like keyboard layout and profile so I'm hopeful that they're comparable.
What exactly counts as a good keyboard? I've never had any trouble with my XPS, and don't really see how one could mess up a laptop's keyboard (then again, I haven't had that many laptops). Although some of the cheaper laptop's keyboards seem clunky.
I have a Dell XPS from 2008 (now a tertiary machine) and some of its keys will get momentarily get "stuck" under the laptop chassis when returning from the compressed position.
My parents have a Toshiba laptop from around 2011, and its keyboard is undescribably atrocious. Poor key layout (small keys & excessive space between keys), overly resistant and springy key dynamics, very slippery key surface, etc.
The best laptop keyboard I've had was the late 90's ~ early 2000's IBM-era thinkpads.
Fair enough. When I'm looking for a keyboard, I always try to make sure that at least the keys are all in the right place and are of the right size. (For example, I should not be able to accidentally hit '\' because some hippo thought the return key was too big.)
How do you know it was flagged? By the drop off in votes? I thought flagged stories got deleted/"dead"-ed. Are the stories that only show up with showdead different than stories that are flagged?
Experimental thinkpads are okay with me. Might be nice to see a revisit of that butterfly keyboard on the 701 for instance...
What really bugs me is thinkpads with shit screen resolution. Like, really shit, even compared to less heavy duty cheaper laptops. Thinkpads should not cut costs.
I'm sitting in front of a 1280x800 14" unit here and am quite happy. I can't see the pixels thanks to TrueType in Windows. Retina/high DPI displays are no advantage for my combination of eyes and brain.
I have a 22" 1920x1080 display on my desk which I rarely use as it gives me a headache.
I miss the 1680x1050 15.6" thinkpads. Now they're selling 15.6" T-series that have a pathetic 1366x768 unless you want to spend 2-300 more for 1980x1080.
I should not be able to get on Lenovo's site, look at the current T-series, think back to my (now half a decade old!) 2007 T60p, and be disappointed and underwhelmed. If cheaper less powerful computers are being sold with better screens than T-series thinkpads, there is something very wrong going on.
"...I can lug around this 1.5kg monster despite feeling fairly strongly that a laptop should weigh 1kg or less."
Are there laptops with any respectable screen real-estate weighing in at < 1kg? My primary laptop is a 13" Air. 1kg is only 70% of its weight. I was unaware they got much lighter while sporting double digit screen sizes.
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64 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadIt's retarded to think that in the late 1990s we had 1600x1200 CRTs at 120hz and great color quality. Now it's almost 15 years later and 120hz isn't even main stream, color quality is worse and we traded some vertical for horizontal resolution.
Wtf?
SSD's do fail, sometimes by accident, sometimes by software bugs. Some muppet added a swap partition to one of our build servers with a Samsung 830 and the cells were all worn out dead in 3 months from swapping.
You are forced to keep proprietary resources (data, code, etc.) in "the cloud". Which is precisely what many businesses want. They don't want information floating around on individual machines, potentially un-backed-up and inaccessible to the business.
Replacing the occasional machine with a bad SSD is a minor inconvenience, by comparison.
See it from the business's perspective, not the individual's.
P.S. Yes, there is a contrary fear of relying on a third party for storage and security (and continued accessibility). But... Google doesn't have that concern WRT deploying this to their own workforce. And... giving it too much consideration doesn't sell their own services (Google Apps, Drive, etc.). And I still don't think Google really wants to be in the hardware business as a primary product and revenue stream.
Oh, and... have your own "cloud", to whatever degree. Google can sell that, too. (It has already, to various agencies of the U.S. Federal government.)
Your comment makes no sense... considering the only reason you/hn/whoever even reads his posts is because he's the Linux guy. If he wasn't nobody would even read it, and you can't troll nothing lol.
Right now, unless something with a >1080p screen comes out, the ThinkPad Helix (https://www.lenovo.com/products/us/tablet/thinkpad/thinkpad-...) will probably remain on the top of my list for when the warranty on my current laptop runs out. At least it has 1080p on a 12" screen, rather than making me choose between a 720p I don't mind carrying and a 1080p boat anchor.
Reading my sentence again, I think we can agree CSS is not well behaved.
This is a shortcoming of traditional GDI+ based Windows apps however, not of WPF based Metro apps.
[0] http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pixe...
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/21/google-announces-1299-chrom...
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MacBookPro_Retina
This makes ANY laptop useless.
_Does it have a good keyboard??_
(Laptop keyboards seem to become worse as the years go on -- with the exception of macbooks and possibly Thinkpads -- and I'm really hoping that the Chromebook Pixel has a respectable keyboard)
Some of the pictures on Google's site seem to suggest a macbook-like keyboard layout and profile so I'm hopeful that they're comparable.
The touchpad clicks really loudly, but the Pixel has a new glass touchpad so that might not be an issue anymore.
My parents have a Toshiba laptop from around 2011, and its keyboard is undescribably atrocious. Poor key layout (small keys & excessive space between keys), overly resistant and springy key dynamics, very slippery key surface, etc.
The best laptop keyboard I've had was the late 90's ~ early 2000's IBM-era thinkpads.
"What's with this ~` key? Nobody uses that, and it offends my designer sensibilities."
I had a Dell like that, and got used to typing $HOME and $(command) rather than ~ and `command`.
As long as you don't mind lacking a home, end, pageup, pagedown, F11, F12, or delete key, you should have no trouble using the keyboard.
For a closeup of the keyboard layout: http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pixe...
The post 'How I ended up with a Mac' by Miguel[1] got flagged off the front page while this post is zooming up the front page.
Coincidence?
http://hnrankings.info/5327247/
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5327247
I'm rather worried about how Lenovo have gone all experimental. I still want an old fashioned black brick with a clitmouse.
What really bugs me is thinkpads with shit screen resolution. Like, really shit, even compared to less heavy duty cheaper laptops. Thinkpads should not cut costs.
I have a 22" 1920x1080 display on my desk which I rarely use as it gives me a headache.
I should not be able to get on Lenovo's site, look at the current T-series, think back to my (now half a decade old!) 2007 T60p, and be disappointed and underwhelmed. If cheaper less powerful computers are being sold with better screens than T-series thinkpads, there is something very wrong going on.
"...I can lug around this 1.5kg monster despite feeling fairly strongly that a laptop should weigh 1kg or less."
Are there laptops with any respectable screen real-estate weighing in at < 1kg? My primary laptop is a 13" Air. 1kg is only 70% of its weight. I was unaware they got much lighter while sporting double digit screen sizes.
Available countries: http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
If I can't buy it, it's practically non-existent. A pity, all those devices Google has come up with are really interesting.