I'd rather pay more for a high-end Cortex A15-based ChromeBox. Browsing will be very slow on an ARM11 chip, especially if you use it in "desktop mode", which will make it feel even slower compared to using it in a mobile phone. Also, it better have a good GPU, otherwise it won't even support resolutions higher than 800x480 (this one might).
But I do think ChromeOS devices should be somewhere in the $200 price range (or free with contract if you want LTE and plan on using it on the go).
In 1989 I ran a Unix system with 1000 users on hardware less powerful than this, why this kind of horse power cannot run something as simple as a web browser says more about the inefficiencies inherent in current operating systems and programming methods than they do about the hardware.
"why this kind of horse power cannot run something as simple as a web browser"
Web browsers aren't simple. Every web page is a complicated nest of sizing constraints and it seems like hardly a CSS property is added without making that worse. And then IE4 had to come along and make all of these sizing constraints dynamically changeable. And then we wanted fancier font rendering, so glyphs weren't free or even cheap anymore.
And I'm just talking text & tags here, not even remotely about anything like OpenGL or video, just core browser stuff.
You can render web pages on mere dribbles of power with Links/Lynx, but it's not some sort of mere coincidence that the result is a much degraded experience, it's actually fundamental to what a web browser is nowadays. I mean, look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTnIxIA5KGw And that's a simple webpage.
> as simple as a web browser says more about the inefficiencies inherent in current operating systems and programming methods than they do about the hardware.
No. This is simply not true, at least at the extreme you are suggesting.
What I have open on my quad-core 8GB RAM desktop right now:
two Eclipse sessions; One emacs server, with about 20 client windows; Firefox, with 30+ tabs; 20 or so console sessions; five PDFs of documentation; an IRC client; an image viewer and a Jabber client. All of this is spread over two big monitors, with antialiased fonts, fast scrolling, lots of undo history and all sorts of good things.
The truth is that expectations have changed. Say all you want about having 1000 users on a single core, but users today are getting a much richer environment, and capabilities that we only could have dreamed of twenty years ago. This isn't waste or inefficiency, it's using what we have.
Web browsers are also far from simple. High resolution graphics, interactive sites, multiple format support, dynamic content loading, antialiased fonts and all these other things do add up. Compare that to what a user was doing on a tiny slice of a machine 20 years ago. I'd call it progress.
You can still run a lot of users on "modest" hardware. Dave Richards posts regularly about his terminal server work for Largo, Florida. 250 users running GNOME, firefox, libreoffice, etc. on one server with 64GB of RAM may not be up to 1989 standards, but it isn't shabby.
Agreed, just that image of the VIA board takes 730k. That's over 11 Apple IIs and most people have multiple tabs each with multiple images, streaming video players, iTunes, etc. running.
Heck, just a unicode font that includes every character in the basic plane takes 22Meg! Did that guys 1989 unix box display Chinese, Japanese and Korean?
Now go read the hardware compatibility list: http://www.menuetos.net/hwc.txt. It only apparently supports 4 network cards, 2 audio cards and a handful of video cards, and all of them are very old tech.
It's essentially a niche operating system, and isn't going to do 1/10th of the stuff that one written with "bloatware" is going to be capable of. I mean, look at what it has for a browser: http://www.menuetos.net/098b3.png
Oh, I'm sure this will run lynx with no problem at all! ;) It appears to me, though, nowadays most people prefer nice graphic interfaces, free-style layouts, visual and audio effects.
The whole multimedia thing, you know.
Also, this Android box costs and weighs a fraction of that wonderful machine you used to serve 1000 of users.
So I'd still call it a progress worth 25 years of technology evolution.
People should read your comment a few times to let it sink in.
But, iRobot, why should we care about efficiencies? Energy grows on trees.
I predict we are going to see many, many more ARM devices. And Apple is going to lead the way.
This is going to bother some people who like to write bloated, inefficient code. Their focus is on multi-core and concurrency. But to do simple things (retrieving text, images, audio, or video via http, sending/receiving email, etc), one does not need that much power.
The rise of ARM will create opportunity for a different set of programmers who are more efficiency-conscious.
But I do think ChromeOS devices should be somewhere in the $200 price range (or free with contract if you want LTE and plan on using it on the go).