| > Anandtech has already tested a beta version It's an interesting experiment but I don't think Google is aiming to please the crowd with the need for "native apps" anyways and they wouldn't be terribly interested in keeping the native VLC dependencies alive and/or compatible. It seems pretty obvious to me that Google is trying to push the mainstream consumer market into a "cloud computing/services lifestyle", it only makes sense because their whole business model revolves around web users. So VLC is out, Netflix/Playstore is in. Not for me, don't get me wrong, I'm not that kind of consumer and it may be safe to state that most people within the HN crowd isn't either. I'm personally following and waiting for the Novena[1] laptop and open hardware to be launched. Even if chromeOS is removed and Gnu/Linux is loaded instead, chromebooks' keyboards look abysmally ugly and useless to me, otherwise I would at least be excited about the inexpensive hardware. So yeah, as a consumer I can distill my opinion about this product to "meh...", but as a web developer though, that's a different story, the possibility of Google hardware converting handheld mobile users to desktop-ish mobile users and reaching a broader international audience makes me almost enthusiastic about Chromebooks. After all, until some potentially better hardware project (Firefox OS [2] or Indie Phone [3], who knows) expands to the netbook-ish form factor ("Lapfox"?/"Indiebook"?), the not-so-open inexpensive Chromebook hardware & affordable by hundreds of millions (potentially billions, we'll see) introduces and welcomes new demographics to the web and is better for the world (in the short run) than almost-fully-open expensive hardware that only a few million can afford (for now), don't you think? [1]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop [2]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/ [3]: https://ind.ie/about/ |