Google Says Faster Chromebooks On The Way

Wait, if Chromebooks aren't cheap, what exactly is their benefit over a regular ultralight laptop?

Razor512people still use chrome books?I don't see how they could have ever thought they would be successful. What google essentially did was take a netbook, install a less functional Os compared to windows, then charge twice as much for the netbook.You're thinking of Apple.

OK maybe both.

Faster? Maybe the new Atom chips will be a bit faster, but not much. So maybe Google will use AMD trinity/Piledriver chips?

Why build faster one when the originals did not sell and speed was not the issue? I guess with all that cash, Google needs another tax write-off.

The pricing decision rather than speed has been the main complaint. Sure there are lots of nerds on blogs like this who have never actually used a Chromebook who complain about the speed - or rather the poor speed you would get on it if you ran Windows on it (and which you do with Windows netbooks). However if you look at the comments from people who have actually bought Chromebooks and used them (for example the Amazon customer reviews), speed isn't a complaint, and in fact they feel it is fast and snappy. The reason of course is that Chromebooks are fast and responsive - if you run ChromeOS on it since the only thing that runs on it is a web browser, but painfully slow (a la Windows netbook) if you run Windows. The only exception to this is Flash which is poorly maintained and doesn't seem to be properly accelerated, but then again the same would apply to a Windows netbook. The people who buy Chromebooks buy it mainly for Internet browsing, webmail, and occasional Doc apps and don't spend their time running Flash games, so speed isn't a problem for them.

This is all changing now, because of the emergence of Native Client applications and games. These are rapidly being ported to run on Chrome, and bring local applications to Chromebooks. Pretty well any desktop game or application written in any programming language can be ported to Native Client - CAD programs, photo editors, video and audio editors, media players without hardware acceleration - the sort of applications that could never run in a web browser before. This is a game changer for Chrome and Chromebooks, and Chromebooks are going to need more powerful processors as well as better graphics and media acceleration to handle this. This is the reason, rather than customer complaints, that Chromebooks is getting faster cpus, plus the fact that lower production numbers for Atoms may mean that the price advantage of Atoms may not be that attractive, although the longer battery life advantage remains.

The thing about the Chromebook is that it has never seriously been marketed to the consumer, although those who are in the know do see a big potential. Microsoft has started it's patent cartel licensing extortion scam to cover Chromebooks as well Android - a sure sign that Microsoft considers Chromebooks to be a serious threat to Windows. Dixons, UK's largest consumer electronic chain, made a statement that one in ten computers sold could be Chromebooks by end of 2012 if they are properly marketed. Whether Google will do this or not remains to be seen. Google is pushing Android for the consumer market, and so far Chromebooks have only being marketed aggressively sold to education, libraries, and businesses with server based IT systems eg. help desks, information terminals etc. The outlets, pricing and spec of Chromebooks are part of this. Consumers need to try before they buy, especially on something as revolutionary as Chromebooks, but Google only sells them on online retail outlets, and they have to pay a premium price for outright purchase. It is clear that Google sees these sales only as a means of making Chromebooks available to early adopters to try out before larger education or business rollouts, rather than mass market sales. The specs are also not intended for the consumer market. The build quality is high, and battery life gets priority over minimising cost or games performance, which is essential in schools or businesses where reliability, ruggedness, and long battery life are important, and games and video media consumption less so, but not ideal for a consumer device.

Tom's Hardware is by definition nerd central, and it is not surprising that the posters seem completely clueless about the real selling point of Chromebooks. Chromebooks are ZERO MAINTENANCE DEVICES. They are for people who don't want to spend time on maintaining or learning how to configure Windows, troubleshoot hardware, updating the OS or applications, installing apps, etc. They just want to switch on the computer and use it. This is the complete opposite of what any self respecting nerd - myself included - buys a computer for. Nerds want to hack the hardware, the OS, tweak and overclock everything there is to be tweaked to squeeze out every last benchmark score point, install and run applications they are never actually going to use for real productive use, just to prove that the computer can run it etc. This is why they buy computers, and this is what their enjoyment of computers is all about. The thing is that most consumers consumers of computers nowadays aren't nerds and want a computer free of the maintenance hassles and user learning curve associated with Windows. Chromebooks have proved successful in school trials precisely because they are zero maintenance, and they have proved to be viable for large scale deployment in schools where Windows was not because they can operate without a desktop support IT team and without teachers wasting time on desktop support and maintenance instead of teaching. The same benefits apply to the vast majority of consumers who buy computers, and if Google's own nerds (and Google is basically an all nerd company) can get its heads out of the nerd mentality, Chromebooks will be a huge consumer success. What we need is a cheap ARM based Raspberry Pi (perhaps with a dual processor) SOC selling for $100 or so, or a $35 Raspberry Pi board built into or as a plug in option for every TV or high end monitor, so it can be used as a standalone Internet terminal or thin client for RDP, or Citrix.

Great post, 534564!