You may have heard of the Google Chrome notebooks: They will feature
only a web browser (Chrome, of course). Everything you do on the machine will be done on the Net and with web apps. If you don't have a Net connection, the machine is a doorstop. There's no access to local files and not other apps or system on the machine.
Rumors are now that the machines will be paid by subscription. You don't own them, you rent them cheaply.
I'll do my thing again: isn't it amazing that in the nineties, notebooks were luxury products which cost three times the price of a desktop machine, and still were much slower and had cramped screens. In the noughties, they pretty much replaced desktops for many. (Even for many people who didn't need the mobility, which I don't really understand.) And apparently in the tens, they will be virtually disposable, to be replaced like the cardboard cylinder in a roll of TP.
The Google machines haven't been seen yet, but they'll be dirt-standard notebooks. Journalists have been given beta machines looking like stealth planes, black and pure. Like a cyberspace deck from a William Gibson book. If I were them, I'd keep that look.
And I see they have removed the cardboard in the center of some TP rolls, wiht a very small paper "tube" which goes over a spindle.
ReplyDeleteBut also in the nineties, dear Eolake, Sun launched its NetPC project, to do exactly the same as the Chrome netbooks. They were "dumb terminals", working on the Web... on 1996. Almost nobody had a broadband connection in those days, so the computers had to work by dial up. Really frightening.
ReplyDeleteHere there is an article of that year, about it:
http://news.cnet.com/Suns-Net-PC-will-target-businesses/2100-1001_3-211392.html
Love, Marcelo.
Ah yes, I remember. Talk about being ahead of your time.
ReplyDeleteTrying to work on a dial-up, urgh.