[nirvana]

I think people musnderstand what it is that Apple does best. And what it is is deliver great products that focus on what the consumer needs.

Google has yet to deliver a compelling or wildly popular hardware product to the market. Google is getting really great at propaganda and hype though-- like that carefully set up PR event of brin on the subway with glass.

Glass and this computer are both misfires because glass is just a bluetooth headset with a camera-- it needs a network to work. It needs an iPhone or android device to teather too (and I still think its really going to have bad battery life.)

Same with this netbook-- it doesnt' have a real operating system, and it relies on being connected to the cloud all the time... which is impractical in a lot of ways.

The iPad is the competitor to this device, not the macbook. The macbook is a real computer you can use for development, the iPad you can use for content creation but not really hardcore software development.

The iPad is much cheaper, higher build quality, and doesn't need a network connection to really work.

Google's delivered a lot of products like the nexus, the nexus q that have had a lot of hype but haven't really been big successes.

Until they do make a big hardware success you can't really say they're learning to do what Apple does.

It's not like you just call up foxxconn and say "I want 100 million phones made."

Meanwhile, what google does best is selling customers to advertisers and search.

I'd say Apple getting good at that reasonably fast. Apple's SIRI upended search and was a big jump forward. Apple's iAds has not been as successful, but this is probably due to mobile being a hostile environment for ads (google and facebook aren't having great success yet either.)

[jmduke]

I agree with the vast majority of what you said, but Siri upending search seems incredibly pre-emptive.

I think Siri opens a lot of doors, but 90% of the Siri use I've seen (which I admit is somewhat anecdotal, but still) is hands-free texting & easter eggs ("Siri, where can I hide a body?")

Once Apple opens up Siri's functionality a bit more and makes it actually actionable ("Siri, pre-order my usual Chipotle burrito, please.") then things are going to go crazy.

[nirvana]

What you say is correct, but what I was trying to say (you may disagree) is that SIRI was a big jump into mobile search, and that it is a bigger move into mobile search than google's hardware projects have been in competing with Apple.

SIRI is still in the early stages and would benefit a great deal from becoming more of an App platform, but I think that is going to take some time due to the nature of how SIRI works.

[ChuckMcM]

As a 'UI', SIRI was pretty cool, but if you compare SIRI on an Apple device with Google Now on an Apple device, both of them use Google to do the 'search' part except that Google Now's integration with the search backend gives it more visibility in what you are trying to find.

[raverbashing]

I agree

Having used most linux distros and Mac OS X (and Windows, but I can't stand it anymore now), unfortunately Linux is very behind in user experience (not just interface, but the whole experience)

Granted, some of this are hardware/drivers issues (like getting suspend/sleep correctly, good wifi drivers, etc)

Maybe Chromebook can make this better.

- Google hand picked the hardware and can provide the best (sw) configuration for it

- Google makes the browser the center of the experience, so as long as the browser works ok, there's very little beyond that (a basic window manager, network manager, basic linux system, etc)

And yes, you're right, it's more close to an "iPad with a keyboard"