Mac Dies; Google Chromebook To The Rescue – Sort Of

Motley Fool’s Tim Beyers says he’d been having trouble with his nearly three-year-old MacBook Pro since the holidays, and last week, the problem escalated from occasional to frequent as his writing days were suddenly overrun with kernel panics.

A visit to his local Apple Store confirmed his fears that he’d need to leave the machine for repair, with the likely fix either a new hard drive, new logic board, or both. Thus a two-year-old Samsung 500 series Chromebook with 2GB of memory and 16GB of storage, given to him at Google’s early 2011 developer conference, became his primary tool for getting work done in the interim, and two reasonably productive days later, he deems it fair to say that the Chromebook is a useful machine but a lousy Mac substitute, although comparing it with a full-fledged MacBook Pro was always going to be unfair.

However, he says Google begged comparisons when it introduced the Pixel and priced it as if it were a Mac substitute, even though its dual-core 1.8 GHz processor clocks in much slower than newer Macs.

Beyers concludes that the Chromebook is a decent alternative but not a substitute for a Mac, and he would’ve been lost if he didn’t store most of his work in the Cloud using a combination of Google Drive and Dropbox. He predicts that there will come a day when the Chromebook is every bit as good as the laptops it hopes to displace, but we’re not there yet, and it probably won’t be for a few years.

Life In The Cloud With Google’s Chromebook Pixel

The Register’s Iain Thomson notes that it’s been well over two years years since Google released its first Chromebook, the CR-48, and set off on a quest to convince the world of the benefits of living in the browser. Last week, the company unveiled its latest attempt to seduce the public the luxury touchscreen Chromebook Pixel and gave The Reg a $1,449 LTE-equipped version to try out.

Thompson observes that at that kind of money, Google is taking direct aim at Intel Ultrabooks and Apple’s 13-inch MacBook Pro and Air, and notes that after a week of lugging the Pixel around, using it for day-to-day work and trying it out in a variety of locales, he prefers its hardware to an Ultrabook, the MacBook Pro, and in some ways the Air, in terms of design, build-quality, and specifications, calling the Pixel’s screen quality “fantastic,” and its speaker quality “amazing.”

But that’s far from the whole story…… Thompson notes that for many of us an Internet connection can be a tenuous thing, and the Pixel is a frustratingly dysfunctional device without one, while for the same price as the Pixel you can get an Apple MacBook or PC Ultrabook with an Internet-independent operating system that gives you many more options, and there are also serious shortfalls in the amount of software that’s available for the Pixel, all making it simply too expensive for what it is for, and predicting that at the Pixel’s premium price, it’ll be a tough sell.