I think this product will do well especially for students, start-up businesses, or even for leisure use. Google's goal is to be able to address the affordability and at the same time not sacrificing quality. It definitely isn't the best machine out there but it is sufficient for daily use of middle-income consumers and students. On their video ad, it's obvious that they are also focusing on an international market where it's not focused on first-world countries only. I think it's a great step for Google to create something very affordable that has a good quality for their product to reach all facets of the world.
> Google's goal is to be able to address the affordability and at the same time not sacrificing quality.
Google's goal is to sell its cloud services, not the hardware here. The specs are crappy and that laptop is basically useless if you are doing anything else than internet. Sure it cost 150$, but that's an expensive surfing machine. And Google is off course selling internet services...
> I think this product will do well especially for students, start-up businesses, or even for leisure use.
You know, the exact same arguments were used to sell netbooks(students,leisure), which were an horrible failure,and you're still falling for that? at least most netbooks ran on windows... You don't even get that with Chrome OS.
People are not idiots, especially those who have a tight budget, they'll be even more vocal about crappy cheap products because it represents a larger share of their income. That thing with these specs... I bet most people are ready to invest $100 more to have at least a proper notebook. You can get a 11 inches Acer laptop for 50 dollars more. With a browser AND windows,with a proper Hard drive.Why would people want to pay JUST for a fucking browser? they wouldn't unless they have so much spare money they don't care.
> Why would people want to pay JUST for a fucking browser?
Because there's a lot you can do with a browser these days. You can even run offline apps and native code (Emscripten, NaCl, PNaCl).
Also, if you turn on developer mode, you can access all the Gentoo bits that hide underneath the Chrome bits.
Consider common use cases - word processing, social media, organising photos, communication - all can be done with a stock Chromebook. Once developers realise the full potential, you'll see bigger, better games that run on Chrome (check out Bastion and From Dust on the Chrome web store - pretty impressive already).
