Chromebook - Pixel - Can it shake Apple?

I think it will definitely put pressure on Apple about medium / long term future and hopefully make them work harder for next set of innovations on their Mac Book Pro/Air line of laptops. At present personally I only see Google's pride in this release of Pixel. I am sure they will find some niche buyers for sure but it is not going to make any dent in market yet. It may inspire Samsung and other Korean/Japanese manufacturers who are investing their time in Chromebook. Hope to see more practical chromebooks from Samsung in near future..

Now coming back specifically to Chromebook reviews.. I agree that its price to performance ratio is yet to catch up with MBA/MBP. Personally, I would be inspired or let us say willing to entertain the idea of buying Pixel if it's price was in $700-800 range. Though, I have to admit that these do have clean look and great appeal.. kind of inspired by Mac Book Air and may be Legendary Thinkpad..

Regarding other limitations such as non availability of Skype and other applications... I am very hopeful that they will go away in matter of time. I am sure that most of applications will start running in browser (or Cloud) if they already don't. In worse case we have cloud based virtual desktops already there, which will take care of these emergencies and exceptions..

I think that Chromebook could be excellent choice for Enterprise customers. If Google can find some partners who can offer Virtual Desktop (VDI) kind of service on Chromebook and if they fix/add/enhance their VPN/Tunnel connectivity.. this device could be great choice for enterprise customers who don't want to keep any data on local disk but want to give seamless experience and connectivity to their employees. Since this device is built from scratch for this type of activity, it could be great option for such enterprise customers. If google can natively fix and divide personal and enterprise traffic and let personal traffic go to their google drive and enterprise traffic tunneled to enterprise Data Center they can potentially make killing in this segment.

It already comes with three years of 1 TB Google Drive which is ideal for enterprise leasing terms. In-fact Google itself can offer VDI type of service in their own Data Center or create hybrid cloud for enterprise customers they can make significant dent in this market... and this is huge market and generally with higher margin than direct consumer market. If they can do this.. then it can be a big threat to Apple who is making bigger inroads in Enterprise Laptop market right now.. as it is more or less fashion statement to carry Mac in office...

So Google just need to do minor tweaking in their offering and they will be ready for prime time with Pixel and it can become next fashion statement..

I am not really worried about connectivity or even LTE upgrade for Chromebook.. In fact I can't understand.. why anybody even buys 4G/LTE enabled Tablets  or even Chromebooks.. All the folks who will buy these things typically have smartphones and almost all smartphones including iPhone has this feature of hotspot. Essentially, this feature turns your smartphone as wi-fi access point and you can piggy back on Cellular data to provide connectivity to your other devices. Anyhow.. that is not main point.. main point is that we are almost ready for such cloud based devices..

Welcome to another round of upgrades or device refreshes!!!

Google’s Chromebook Pixel is pricey, limited

Intended as a flagship for its Chrome operating system, Google’s new Chromebook Pixel feels too much like overkill.

Chrome OS was conceived of as a simple and inexpensive computing platform.

The software is built around a Web browser and cloudbased applications; everything you do on a Chrome device is done through a browser window.

Previous Chromebooks were basic and inexpensive. They generally lacked the latest processors and didn’t come with any high-end features.

By contrast, offering premium features is the Pixel’s reason for being. It’s purpose is to show that Chrome doesn’t have to be relegated to low-end machines and to inspire Google’s partners to expand the range of their Chromebook offerings. Google representatives said the Pixel is their attempt to create a Chromebook that the boss would be proud to take home. 

In terms of design, the Google folks have achieved their goal. The Pixel is thinner and lighter than Apple’s comparable Mac-Book Pro, but feels just as sturdy. Like the Apple laptops, the Pixel’s case is made from aluminum, not from the plastic found on the less-expensive Chromebooks. The Pixel has sharper edges and is much more rectangular than the MacBook Pros, which gives it a sleek, modern look. 

The Pixel takes another page from Apple by including a high-resolution screen similar to Apple’s “Retina” display. 

In fact, the Pixel’s screen is even higher resolution than those in Apple’s new MacBook Pros. It’s beautiful and bright, making text and pictures super-sharp. 

But Google has also looked beyond Apple for inspiration. The Pixel features a touch screen like those found in many of the latest Windows laptops. 

And it includes a powerful Intel Core i5 processor, which is standard fare on Apple and Windows-based notebooks, but is unique for a Chromebook. 

The processor makes a difference. While the Samsung Chromebook I recently tested felt sluggish, the Pixel is snappy and responsive, instantly resuming from sleep and quickly switching among tabbed Web pages. The Pixel also offers some uncommon features. One model includes an LTE radio, which provides a fast Internet connection when you aren’t near a Wi-Fi hotspot. That model also includes a limited amount of monthly broadband access from Verizon for two years. All models of the Pixel come with 1 terabyte of space on the Google Drive cloud storage service for free for three years. That’s a bargain, because Google typically charges $50 a month for that much space. 

But despite all of its bells and whistles, the Pixel is still a Chromebook and suffers the same limitations as the others. 

Because Chrome is designed to run Web-based apps, the operating system lacks many popular PC applications. You won’t find Skype, for example, or Photoshop or many high-end video games. And if you need to use special software for work or to connect to a device in your house, you can almost be certain that software won’t be available for Chrome. 

That lack of applications means you simply can’t do as much with a Chromebook as you can with a Mac or Windows PC. If you’re spending only $250 for a basic Chromebook, that shortcoming is acceptable. 

But it’s not when you’re spending $1,300, which is the starting price of the Pixel. For that money, you can get a very nice Windows machine or Apple’s MacBook Air. 

And some of the Pixel’s embellishments that help to drive up its price seem unnecessary. The touch screen in particular seems to have little use. 

Google hasn’t redesigned Chrome’s interface to take advantage of the touch screen. And unlike some of the new Windows notebooks, the Pixel’s screen doesn’t detach or fold back on itself, so you can’t use the device like a tablet. 

While the screen is wonderful, it has one huge drawback: it drains the device’s battery. Google says users should see up to five hours of battery life from the Pixel. That’s already less than you’d get on many of the latest Mac or Windows laptops. But in my testing, the battery life wasn’t even as good as advertised; I got around 4  1 ⁄ 2 hours of use at best. So while I understand Google’s impulse and appreciate the Pixel’s design and display, I’m not convinced that anyone yet needs a premium Chromebook. 

Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-840-4285 or twolverton@mercurynews. 

com. Follow him at www.mercurynews.com/troywolverton or Twitter. com/troywolv. 

Mac Book Pro with Retina Display - Impressive.. nah..

Sadly I also agree with Troy on this. I went to Mac Store with such a high excitement to look at MBP with Retina display.. Unfortunately (or as per my wife, "Fortunately!!") my eyes with -5 power glasses on it couldn't make any difference when comparing next to regular MBP. In fact, after seeing this and even regular MBP, I became even bigger fan of Mac Book Air (MBA). It's 13 inch display was looking much better than both MBP and MBP-R. It's form factor and feel in hand and key board and everything about it was simply magical to me..

I know I am going to get big rebuttal from one of my very good friend and family member about this article, but, sadly, I can't agree about this. Retina display is at the most good for iPad at least for common people like us. It is definitely nice to have.. I may pay few bucks here and there for it.. but not even couple of hundreds..


Apple’s newchapter

MacBook Pro is beautiful computer, but it’s more expensive than typical laptop

I know I’m supposed to be blown away by Apple’s new MacBook Pro with Retina display — but I’m not.

It’s a very nice computer. And the screen, which according to Apple has such a high resolution that the typical user can’t see its individual pixels, is beautiful.

But compared with the typical laptop, the MacBook Pro with Retina display — couldn’t Apple have come up with a catchier name?

— is very expensive. And the MacBook Pro’s display turns out to have limited benefits, particularly for those who are not creative professionals.

The new Retina display MacBook Pro is Apple’s attempt to remake its professional line of notebooks in the image of its popular MacBook Air computers. As it did with the Air, Apple built the new Pro around flash storage.

So, like the Air, the Retina Pro lacks both a  hard drive and a DVD drive. 

TECH FILES

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JOSIE LEPE/STAFF 

The result is a computer that is more than a pound lighter than the comparable hard-drive MacBook Pro and is more than half a centimeter thinner. The flash drive makes the Retina Pro a superfast machine. From a cold boot, I was able to get to its login screen within 15 seconds. 

And I could shut it down in about 5 seconds. Depending on how many programs or Web pages I had open when I shut the computer down, I could have everything automatically reopened in as little as 30 seconds and no more than a minute. 

Despite its thin size, the Retina Pro has similar battery life to the hard-drive based MacBook Pros and comes with the same updated quad-core Intel mobile processors. And it offers the same Nvidia graphics chips as those computers with, in some cases, more graphics memory. But the Retina Pro’s screen is clearly its standout feature. The device’s display has four times the resolution of the base models of the regular MacBook Pros. It’s bright, vivid and super-sharp, although the difference between it and the older screens can be hard to tell unless you have them side-by-side. Apple pioneered its Retina display concept with the iPhone 4 and brought the technology to the iPad earlier this year. On-screen images and applications on both look much sharper than on previous models, and the screens on those older models look pixilated by comparison. On a Mac, a high-resolution display potentially offers more significant benefits. Users wanting to edit video can display a high-definition video at full 1080p resolution and still have plenty of room left over for editing controls and thumbnails of other images. Likewise, users editing pictures can zoom in on fine grained details while still being able to see a significant portion of the overall image. 

Even if you’re not into photo or video editing, you could still benefit from a high-resolution display. 

The new display allows users to greatly enlarge the text in e-books or Web pages without the words becoming fuzzy. 

At least it can in some cases. One of the Retina Pro’s shortcomings is that while Apple has updated its own applications for the display, very few programs or websites from other companies are designed to be used or viewed on it. The result is that text, images or applications can look worse than they would on a lower-quality screen because the computer has to stretch low-resolution fonts and pictures over a greater number of pixels. 

If you download a PDF document and view it in Apple’s Preview program, which has been updated for the new display, it looks beautiful. You can zoom in to the point that regular text is jumbo-sized and it still will look sharp and clear. 

Not so if you view the same document in Google’s Chrome browser via its built-in PDF reader. In that case, the more you zoom in, the fuzzier the text tends to look. And it’s not just PDFs. If you’re using Chrome, the text of typical websites can look fuzzy. Text looks better in Apple’s own Safari browser, but Web page graphics often look blurry. 

The problem isn’t limited to Web browsers. The Kindle app for the Mac also isn’t optimized for the new screen and the text looks out of focus when enlarged. Tweets in the Twitter app look fuzzy even at regular size. Many of these problems will be solved over time as developers update their apps, graphics and Web pages to better support the new display. But there are other reasons to pass on the Retina Pro, and one is price. 

The base model costs $2,200. That’s a staggering sum, given that you can buy a Windows laptop with the same chip and graphics processor — but no Retina display or flash drive — for less than a $1,000. 

And $2,200 gets you no bells and whistles. Add more memory, a faster processor and a larger flash drive to the Retina Pro and you can easily boost the price to more than $3,000. 

Then there’s the battery. Apple has sealed it up tight inside the Retina Pro. There’s no easy way to swap it out for another one if it runs out of juice or is at the end of its life. 

Unless you are a creative professional who’s looking to replace a desktop or a similarly high-end laptop, you likely don’t need the Retina Pro. If all you need is computer for regular office tasks, but you want one that’s thin, light and quick to boot, you can get a MacBook Air — or a similar Windowsbased ultrabook — for as little as $1,000. 

It won’t come with a Retina display, but you may not notice the difference. 

Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-840-4285 or twolverton@mercurynews. 

com. Follow him at www. 

mercurynews.com/troywolverton or Twitter.com/troywolv.