> I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.

To each their own, but this is absolute insanity.

The HP Dragonfly Chromebook is pretty good. The Asus models are also very nice. The Acers are hit or miss; quality is iffy on those and there's a zillion models so it's impossible to find a specific one.

I wish Framework would keep supporting ChromeOS but alas. You could put ChromeOS Flex on one - it doesn't have Android apps, which is fine for me, and it does support the Linux environment, which is excellent.

You can install ChromeOS on a Mac: https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/

It's a great stopgap OS for older hardware.

Why would you want ChromeOS and not Linux?

> I would go for a Mac Air or Neo, but only if I could install ChromeOS.

Similarly, but I would extend that to mac mini/studio, but I would like Linux on it. I like hardware, but I hate the OS there.

We tried Chromebooks for our kids, and the instant I could buy Neos I did. It might just be that we're fully bought into the Apple ecosystem, but I had a hell of a time trying to get stuff like parental controls figured out on ChromeOS.

Everything on this page suggests it's not for education.

Emphasis on AI and connecting to your phone. How many Iceland trips do students make?

The target is definitely not the K12 education market. It looks more like a premium device which most Chromebooks are not.

I recently heard from couple of Technology Directors at schools that they are looking to procure Macbook Neos replacing their Chromebooks. This might be a strategy to defend their Chromebook market in schools.

Pretty sure when they talked about "very high build quality" and such they're saying this is not a replacement to the cheap chromebooks (which I think the macbook neo is eating anyway) but a higher price point.

I don't think these are Chromebook successors. This is supposed to be a premium line according to the "Android Show" video. But I suspect future Chromebooks will use this OS eventually.

Unless they're cheap, it's not going to sell well for K-12.

I used to work for an ed-tech company that was specifically focused on software for chromebooks and in talking with customers the biggest selling point of chromebooks for schools what their price. The school issued devices get absolutely beat to shit and they just expect a certain number to be decommissioned at the end of the year. Most schools are looking to buy the cheapest thing that does the job and the small group that have the money to actually buy premium devices are going to gravitate toward Apple products.

If Google is selling these for less then $500 then maybe there's a place for them, but like we saw it with the Pixelbook, there just isn't really demand for an $1000 chromebook

Is the value of the Chromebook in education that it is 1) cheap or 2) doesn't do anything except have a browser?

If it is both, then all the Neo needs to do is have a browser only mode and goodbye Chromebook market.

Google MegaPixel!

I know people in general hated it, but I found Stadia to be quite good. I'm not too upset because Google paid me back full purchase price, but it's almost a shame that they managed to mess up cloud gaming that badly.

You have my attention. I assume this would also work well on a worse laptop (since the processing is done in the cloud)?

> ChromeOS is probably more RAM efficient

Based on? Chrome tabs taking up gigs of RAM would make me think ChromeOS isn't going to be very light on memory.

I am old enough to remember that iPad was supposed to be a product-line-dooming bad name.

The first thing that came to mind is "What about all that gobbledygook in your Google-dee-book?"

I'm imagining poultry running around clucking: "gBook! gBook! gBAWK!"

Just the build quality on MacBooks compared to your random PC laptop piece of plastic that falls apart within a few years would make me very picky. I have a random “corporate” Lenovo and everything physical in it is way way worse than in my work MacBook

It's $600. In this market that's practically free.

Google Pixelbook from years ago was $999 IIRC. I wouldn't be surprised if Googlebook is more expensive than Neo.

I still remember the Maxipad jokes.

I can tell you they're not going to be buying "googlebooks" plus, Apple has never until this year offered an actual low-price machine.

Of course their market size is going to be smaller when you're leaving out the sub $1000 dollar market.

They’re surprisingly powerful for all three games that are available on the platform.

Jokes aside, there are some games with competent Mac ports and if you only have an M-series Mac, you can find some titles that play nice. But most of the stuff that you’d play on a PlayStation or on Windows is simply not available.

But the gaming software market is very heavily biased towards delivering for Windows on Intel. That said, I’m not a gamer so what do I know?

I'd like to meet the person that supposed this to you, and ask them what games they play.

> Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power experience that you can get on a Googlebook for half the price?

What makes you think a googlebook will be half the price of a macbook neo?

Also, a used M1 macbook air is $300 on swappa/ebay and will be even better than the neo anyway. It's still more performant than every other non-Apple ARM based laptop/chromebook on the market and will have far superior build quality.

> Google can offer Gemini for free because its TPUs are orders of magnitude more efficient than Nvidia stuff. Even free tier Gemini is really good considering it can integrate with a bunch of your stuff like google docs, and the lower last gen models have pretty generous usage limits

Good point, that could work. Buy this and you get so many years of Gemini for free and such. "Why pay Anthropic $200/month for Claude when you can buy this and get Gemini for free for a few years". OpenAI and Anthropic are not going to make their own devices most likely either to compete.

> Why pay $500-700 for Mac Book Neo for the same low processing power

I pre-ordered a Neo on a whim to use as a couch laptop alongside my work laptop and gaming computer. It's so fast. It blows everything out of the water when it comes to interactivity.

Plus the whole build quality, screen, touchpad and speakers are all so much better than the work Latitude. Linux support is lacking, but it's still a full usable Unix.

Having seen how people managed to run Cyberpunk 2077 on the Neo with okayish frame rates I don't think there's a single ARM laptop out there that could deliver that performance on Linux. Maybe I'm wrong though.

These things are $250?! Where did you find that info?