All Chromebook Plus laptops offer faster processors and double the memory and storage, giving you the power to get more done, easily. All Chromebook Plus laptops also come with a Full HD IPS display — which means you get a full 1080p HD experience when watching streaming content, and crisp, clear viewing for reading, creating content or editing photos and videos. Finally, there’s a 1080p+ webcam with temporal noise reduction for smoother, more lifelike video calls.
So basically, because the Chromebook market is dominated by cheap crap, Google has had to create a new category of Chromebooks that are slightly less crap, so that buyers who don’t want crap but instead want slightly less crap can distinguish the slightly less crap from the crap so they end up buying the crap they want.
Like gaming Chromebooks, I give this like two years before Google sees something shiny and this whole Chromebook Plus thing is dead and gone.
Hate Chromebooks if you want, but I’m glad they’re around. If they weren’t, Microsoft would still control 80% of the market. Linux had a chance to make it big when Windows 8 failed, but then Gnome 3 happened. Gnome 2 being a polished and mature, performant environment, which is the only thing anybody wants out of a computer. I still think it is mighty fishy how aggressively and quickly Gnome 2 was purged. Almost like someone wanted to make sure Linux couldn’t capitalize on the Windows 8 disaster, which was so bad that people were crying for Vista.
BTW if you gave me a Chromebook right now, the first thing I would do is install native Linux with Xfce on it.
kbd,
I felt this way too. Linux desktops had a big opportunity to be the stable alternative to the window 8 chaos, and they blew it with their own desktop mess seemingly at the same time.
BTW I was a big fan of gnome 2 at the time, unity and gnome 3 pushed me to XFCE and KDE.
Same 🙂
> “So basically, because the Chromebook market is dominated
> by cheap crap, Google has had to create a new category of
> Chromebooks that are slightly less crap”
There’s always been basic, premium, and business Chromebooks. I see this as more of a marketing exercise to remind people ChromeOS exists as a product.
Chromebooks are remarkably capable machines for what they are. They took the early ’00s Netbook to the masses. 🙂 The problem is Google. I really wish Mozilla would have continued their FirefoxOS to build a ChromeOS competitor.
Arm processors disappearing from the ChromeOS landscape is also sad. They had an opportunity, and missed it.