I really don't see the market fit for this, I guess the android integration. But my god, I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook". Believe it or not, these things matter a lot, particularly if you're trying to target a young audience.
I loved my Pixelbook, fantastic piece of hardware. When that ended, I went with an Acer Chromebook. Works fine, just not the same.
I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.
I will most likely get a Googlebook, and would be more likely to do so if it was not named Googlebook and did not have Gemini built in.
To each their own, but this is absolute insanity.
I now have a machine that boots almost instantly and just works without maintenance, upgrades, or compatibility issues. I can throw it in the river, and for $300 get a machine that will be up and running in about one minute. I can use multiple machines (small/cheap to bring on a trip, laptop for casual working, larger machine for more serious work, even at the same time. I have full access to everything from my iPhone, or access to some computer anywhere. I use remote VSCode via Crostini to do development work (terminal, vi, Codex, Claude Code) on a bunch of beelink boxes and Hetzner servers.
I cannot run installed software and I am dependent on Google for email, files, photos. For the latter, I have backups of my email and files (photos are not as easy).
Life is simpler this way.
Do you still use vi or were you meaning vi(*) and actually use something else? I've been on vim for a while but happy to go back to vi
We are way out of context window, occupied by OS chores.
Life was simpler when we were dumber, but now, no. Stop lying.
Windows is a hot mess and frankly I wouldn't recommend it to anyone outside of gamers. For the technically competent, there's nothing to gain on Windows, and it will just get in the way. For the those less technically inclined, Windows means complexity and viruses. Also most Windows laptops suck major ass.
MacOS is better, especially if you have an iPhone. But even MacOS is a bit too complex for the less technically inclined. If you have an android phone, then a chromebook is 100% the way to go for those people. Also, chromebooks get crazy software support these days, on par with macbooks.
It also locks you into the cloud services of an advertising company that loves harvesting your data to help find new ways to sell you things.
I use Linux CLI all the time but every time I've tried to use a Linux desktop as a daily driver, it's stopped working one day for reasons that are beyond my ability to care enough to figure out.
see guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
For certain use cases, a computer that can do nothing whatsoever except run the absolute latest version of production Chrome is better than any other device.
I wish Framework would keep supporting ChromeOS but alas. You could put ChromeOS Flex on one - it doesn't have Android apps, which is fine for me, and it does support the Linux environment, which is excellent.
I have used Linux for 20 years, but only for development, and I will only develop on Linux.
For everything else (email, files, photos), I want a browser. Used to be Mac/Osx, but got tired of being managed by it.
Just my preference. You can do everything on Linux, just never felt comfortable with it.
...basically, I have "nerd cred" and run linux on my desktop, but for my laptop I wanted: disposable (no leaky hard drive), zero maintenance (no kernel modules for sound drivers), battery-portable.
90% of the time I'm wanting `vim` + `git` + `ssh`, and 20% of the time i'm wanting to run some random stuff locally. Chromebook is basically zero friction and 1/10th the price (and 1/10th the capabilities) of a "very nice mac laptop", plus you can pop into a very capable linux VM (w/ passthrough GUI support) without a lot of ceremony.
Windows laptops are out of the question, and pure linux laptops (until only very recently) were of marginal support and low battery capabilities (especially "close it and stuff it in a backpack for 3 days").
What century did you write this in?
Dell has sold laptops with first-party Linux support for nearly fifteen years, to say nothing of other smaller OEMS.
As for the battery issues during sleep: that actually has to do with a combination of the BIOS settings + downstream ramifications of secure boot (and how the old-fashioned "hibernate" used to work). Unfortunately, that isn't specific to Linux. My MBP has the same problem, and so do the same laptops running Windows.
It's a great stopgap OS for older hardware.
Similarly, but I would extend that to mac mini/studio, but I would like Linux on it. I like hardware, but I hate the OS there.
Is this satire?
/s
Emphasis on AI and connecting to your phone. How many Iceland trips do students make?
I used to work for an ed-tech company that was specifically focused on software for chromebooks and in talking with customers the biggest selling point of chromebooks for schools what their price. The school issued devices get absolutely beat to shit and they just expect a certain number to be decommissioned at the end of the year. Most schools are looking to buy the cheapest thing that does the job and the small group that have the money to actually buy premium devices are going to gravitate toward Apple products.
If Google is selling these for less then $500 then maybe there's a place for them, but like we saw it with the Pixelbook, there just isn't really demand for an $1000 chromebook
If it is both, then all the Neo needs to do is have a browser only mode and goodbye Chromebook market.
It's hard to explain to normal people that if you have a stable internet connection and live relatively near to a data center and you buy a dongle and a cat6 cable to avoid any Wi-Fi interference and you enjoy playing certain genres of games but not other genres of games, then you can get a good gaming experience.
You have to be a technical person to understand the failure modes and most people aren't technical, get frustrated, and just say that it sucks. Cloud gaming is not a mass market product.
I think that the appeal of this product is that the Wintel monopoly of years ago is dying. If the Googlebook is well executed (as the Apple M1 line was), it can be an option for Android users who wish to move away from Windows but are not knowledgeable enough to use Linux. I think the only problem here is Google's track record of abandoning product ideas. A new product like this requires multiple iterations to get it right, but if Google abandons it as soon as the results are not what was expected, it will not have the time to mature in areas like gaming or app support.
Until other manufacturer step up their game, there will be years and years.
My suggestion, if they really want to go this route, is to shorten it to "gBook".
i'd hate for my computing choice to lack fashion forward qualities -- I wouldn't want to be embarrassed at Gate A-13 with my new Apple perched on my lap proudly while waiting for the next question from my adoring fans.
I hope they appreciate the new color!
real talk : my favorite excuse for using an Apple product throughout my life is the tried and true "my company stuck me with it and I hate this piece of shit.", so I find it kinda fascinating that they're such cult objects -- and to be fair I am sure i'd say exactly the same thing if I was ever stuck in a company stupid enough to try to make me be productive on a fancy chromebook, too.
8GB of RAM for MacOS is a concern. ChromeOS is probably more RAM efficient..
Based on? Chrome tabs taking up gigs of RAM would make me think ChromeOS isn't going to be very light on memory.
Seriously, what’s the draw? The 8 gigs of ram? The 200 gigs of storage? The major lack of ports?
A phone has great battery life and standby power management. What’s the problem with running a different OS on it if it works just fine?
Different stuff for different folks I guess. At work all files are on the cloud, I have a NAS and a computer I can remote into for development. A Neo is just perfect to make all of that mobile.
As for tablets, I’d only recommend one if you need a stylus for drawing or a smaller form factor. I think that is the market where the Neo is competing, that is where you have a point.
A 13" iPad Air with 8GB RAM, 256GB storage and a Magic Keyboard is $1648.
The iPad has a notably more capable CPU, for over double the price.
An Android tablet isn't a capable replacement for a MacBook/iPad. (And I don't know that you can get even get any 13" Android tablet with a reasonable keyboard case for a discount over a MacBook Neo.)
Jokes aside, there are some games with competent Mac ports and if you only have an M-series Mac, you can find some titles that play nice. But most of the stuff that you’d play on a PlayStation or on Windows is simply not available.
And pracically _nobody_ does native Linux games, they're all just running Windows games through Proton, and faster. So fast actually that Proton is Microsoft's performance target :D
But yeah, Proton is so good now that I don't think there's much impetus to port. Test on Deck/Steam Machine/Proton, sure, but not so much port. Steam Play also handles runtime container stuff for native Linux games so that can be pretty good and stable itself, but I've definitely had situations where switching over to the Windows version via Proton is a better result than the native Linux one.
Even games which used to run on mac mostly stopped after 32bit support was killed.
And Apple GPUs have only gotten better.
[0]https://techjourneyman.com/img/blog/m1-ultra-vs-rtx-3090-ben...
My question is, what games are people playing on Mac? Tomb Raider is one of ~6 AAA titles that was ported to Mac in the last decade. All the other big-ticket games - GTA V, Arc Raiders, Elden Ring - are all hamstrung by Apple's terrible translation software and don't run much better with Crossover either.
Apple Silicon, strictly speaking, is the least adept hardware that you can own for gaming. If you are a gamer, almost every single other GPU on the market would perform better for your needs.
My 16" M1 Max is kinda crap at running games - I'd put it somewhere around cheaper laptops with 3050 series GPUs.
I would recommend the same. I absolutely love my Neo. It's such a nice machine for the price.
My 2013 MBP was going strong with Debian until the battery started puffing up last year, and I finally had to recycle it.
I get it, I know I'm not their market, but it still pains me because it was a great laptop.
> I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook"
A "GBook"? "Goog"? "Gook"? "Glook"? "Boogle"?
Of course their market size is going to be smaller when you're leaving out the sub $1000 dollar market.
Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price? Especially considering you can install linux on it natively.
Other then that, Gemini is the biggest advantage. Google can offer Gemini for free because its TPUs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Nvidia stuff. Even free tier Gemini is really good considering it can integrate with a bunch of your stuff like google docs, and the lower last gen models have pretty generous usage limits.
Overall, if you are in Android ecosystem, you don't really even need a cheap laptop anymore, considering things like Samsung Dex exist.
What makes you think a googlebook will be half the price of a macbook neo?
Also, a used M1 macbook air is $300 on swappa/ebay and will be even better than the neo anyway. It's still more performant than every other non-Apple ARM based laptop/chromebook on the market and will have far superior build quality.
Lol. There is zero chance the low end mobile phone SoC shipped in those is remotely as fast as a six year old M1. Even flagship SoCs from qualcomm and samsung still do not exceed it's performance yet.
I pre-ordered a Neo on a whim to use as a couch laptop alongside my work laptop and gaming computer. It's so fast. It blows everything out of the water when it comes to interactivity.
Plus the whole build quality, screen, touchpad and speakers are all so much better than the work Latitude. Linux support is lacking, but it's still a full usable Unix.
Good point, that could work. Buy this and you get so many years of Gemini for free and such. "Why pay Anthropic $200/month for Claude when you can buy this and get Gemini for free for a few years". OpenAI and Anthropic are not going to make their own devices most likely either to compete.
Of course, there are more than 2 options for laptops. Thankfully those two shit companies didn't get to round up that market yet.
