Although it is two decades since network computing was heralded as the next big thing in IT, we may have to wait a little longer still for it to complete its takeover in both the consumer and enterprise arena. Google has put a big stake in the ground with its Chromebook, aiming to combine the utility of a laptop with the entertainment value of a tablet, but naturally for its critics it falls between these two stools. For them it lacks the PC’s essential offline capabilities while being heavier and more cumbersome than a tablet.
Its main appeal at present seems to be for students, school pupils and others who spend a lot of their time on campus within the reach of Wi-Fi and want a low cost work horse with a keyboard priced at around $200. But in the longer term it could paradoxically appeal to the constituency of tablet users who also need a laptop for serious work on the move, by enabling them to converge on a single machine. For that to happen the cloud will have to complete its coming of age and Wi-Fi will have to become ubiquitous, for 4G/LTE on its own will not provide the bandwidth without offload capability.
The point is that the Chromebook is a hybrid device that will be used a lot for consuming multimedia content and accessing TV while also doing serious work. It will also be a budget device competing with lower end tablets like Amazon’s KindleFire, with the competitive advantage of having a proper keyboard. So far it scores better for video consumption, given the high resolution display of some models, than for office productivity where the poor offline capability is a serious handicap for people outside the range of Wi-Fi or perhaps 4G for those with the version supporting that. Offline performance is poor so that users will crave a conventional Windows or iOS based laptop in that mode. Google then fixed this, but at the same time confused the market by coming out with the Chromebook Pixel, which has plenty of power and a superb screen, but at the hefty price of $1,299 within a family touted as being for the budget conscious.
Most Chromebooks have the laptop format and run the Google Chrome OS to run web resident applications rather than traditional client heavy PC software like Microsoft Office and Photoshop. The first Chromebooks from Acer and Samsung began shipping in June 2011, with Lenovo, Hewlett Packard and Google itself entering the fray in early 2013. One desktop version, the Chromebox, was introduced in May 2012. Then in February 2013, Google began shipping the high end Chromebook Pixel, which was hostage to fortune because it was naturally compared unfavorably with top end laptops having superior specifications, such as having 128 GB instead of 32GB solid state drives.
Nonetheless Chromebooks have easily been the most successful Linux based machines to date and have carved out a new niche in the consumer sector for genuine thin client machines to serve an era where work and entertainment become increasingly entwined. The machine achieves what Microsoft and Intel should have done years ago in aping the tablet’s near instant boot up and relative freedom from software induced crashes, while also avoiding the need for client based security or antivirus protection, which sometimes causes more problems than it solves anyway. Google employed a multilevel cloud based security approach that is supposed to insulate the client from attacks so that when breaches do occur the user is unaware of them.
Some of the early reviews focused on Chromebook’s dullness, its lack of novelty and native power. But that came from a constituency accustomed to running computationally intensive applications for gaming or video editing. Chromebook is really aimed at ordinary users who want machines that can be turned on at once and work, like smartphones and tablets, without offering great potential for expansion, where limited choice is deemed a virtue.
This is where the Chromebook’s fate will be settled and so far the omens are quite good. One question will be over whether demand for traditional keyboards will be sustained given that users coming out of school and university now are increasingly comfortable with touch screen keys even for high volume text entry. If that is the case, then the future lies with tablets, but that is likely to be further out. Meanwhile the Chromebook looks like having a good innings on the back of carrier Wi-Fi.