Two Highly Curious Objects arrived in my office recently and have provoked many hours of blank stares and idle speculation: a tube of sunblock and a Google Chromebook.
A piece of mail that arrived later in the week revealed that the sunblock was a gimmick to promote a backup service. So: one mystery was solved. I'm still stymied about the Chromebook.
The basic concept is simple enough. The idea is to have a whole class of computers that act as nothing more than host organisms for the Google Chrome browser. Everything else--apps, documents, media, and even the set of scratches that the buckle of your watchband makes on the palmrest of an old-fashioned and obsolete notebook, I suppose, exist solely on Google's servers.
It's entirely possible that you've sensed my skepticism for the whole Chromebook concept. I admit that I keep getting stuck on the fact that this $499 Chromebook costs as much as a nice name-brand Windows notebook. The Windows machine can literally do everything the Chromebook can do (once you've installed the Chrome browser). It also runs hundreds of thousands of Windows apps and games and according to this sticker on the box, it has an exciting feature called "can actually function as a computer even when there's no Wi-Fi present."
Well, I'll give Google credit for something: they've hit upon an exciting basic idea. As Apple users, we've long been aware of the profound benefits of hardware that's been designed specifically to take advantage of a specific operating system and library of software. A Chromebook takes that idea one step further: it's designed to take advantage of a specific OS, specific software... and the network.
"Assume that the user will typically have Internet access" has many implications and "if you don't have it, you're completely screwed" is only one of them. When you design a PC and an OS with that basic assumption, you're free to throw away things that would ordinarily be considered sacrosanct. It's like that Eureka moment in the development of the Apollo lunar lander, when Grumman engineers realized that a craft that would never be manned in Earth gravity didn't need half the standard stuff that they'd been putting in airplanes for the previous thirty years. Stuff like, you know... seats.
What sort of notebook would Apple have made if they'd come up with this "build a machine with the assumption that its user has access to a tailor-made Internet and a cloud service" idea themselves? The question is of no particular interest. Apple thought of it, and Apple built it: it's the 11-inch MacBook Air. Apple just couldn't call it the iCloudBook when it was released last October. The cloud service that caused the machine to suddenly make perfect, elegant sense was still eight months away from its public unveiling.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com
A piece of mail that arrived later in the week revealed that the sunblock was a gimmick to promote a backup service. So: one mystery was solved. I'm still stymied about the Chromebook.
The basic concept is simple enough. The idea is to have a whole class of computers that act as nothing more than host organisms for the Google Chrome browser. Everything else--apps, documents, media, and even the set of scratches that the buckle of your watchband makes on the palmrest of an old-fashioned and obsolete notebook, I suppose, exist solely on Google's servers.
It's entirely possible that you've sensed my skepticism for the whole Chromebook concept. I admit that I keep getting stuck on the fact that this $499 Chromebook costs as much as a nice name-brand Windows notebook. The Windows machine can literally do everything the Chromebook can do (once you've installed the Chrome browser). It also runs hundreds of thousands of Windows apps and games and according to this sticker on the box, it has an exciting feature called "can actually function as a computer even when there's no Wi-Fi present."
Well, I'll give Google credit for something: they've hit upon an exciting basic idea. As Apple users, we've long been aware of the profound benefits of hardware that's been designed specifically to take advantage of a specific operating system and library of software. A Chromebook takes that idea one step further: it's designed to take advantage of a specific OS, specific software... and the network.
"Assume that the user will typically have Internet access" has many implications and "if you don't have it, you're completely screwed" is only one of them. When you design a PC and an OS with that basic assumption, you're free to throw away things that would ordinarily be considered sacrosanct. It's like that Eureka moment in the development of the Apollo lunar lander, when Grumman engineers realized that a craft that would never be manned in Earth gravity didn't need half the standard stuff that they'd been putting in airplanes for the previous thirty years. Stuff like, you know... seats.
What sort of notebook would Apple have made if they'd come up with this "build a machine with the assumption that its user has access to a tailor-made Internet and a cloud service" idea themselves? The question is of no particular interest. Apple thought of it, and Apple built it: it's the 11-inch MacBook Air. Apple just couldn't call it the iCloudBook when it was released last October. The cloud service that caused the machine to suddenly make perfect, elegant sense was still eight months away from its public unveiling.
Source: http://www.computerworld.com
