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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

One could argue that internal politics (in the form of the rise of Sundar Pichai) are what propped ChromeOS up to the point where it was even a question whether a device like this should run Android or not given that ChromeOS's functionality is theoretically a subset of Android (given a full-featured Chrome browser for Android).

I realize that in practice many people buy ChromeOS devices primarily to run Crouton or their own bootloaded Linux build which this is a complication for, but I don't believe that is relevant to the internal politics issue.

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I disagree. I see them as very different value propositions.

Chrome OS is about giving you a baseline (80-90%) computing environment with as little administrative overhead as possible (easy to setup, easy to share device, no driver issues and so on). That's why Chromebooks are doing well in the education sector.

By contrast, an Android convertible like the Pixel C is about giving you a general-purpose Android environment in a different form factor.

There's some blurring around the edges (Android has a Chrome browser missing some desktop features, Chrome OS can run some popular Android apps), but they're nevertheless aiming at very different targets.

And a device like this points up those distinctions rather well. It's a 2-in-1, like the iPad Pro and the Surface/Surface Pro line. But, and I'd say weirdly even more than the iPad Pro highlights the dichotomy between iOS and OS X, the Pixel C really drives home the difference between Android and ChromeOS. To get the full Google 2-in-1 experience (something that offers all the promise of a tablet AND all the promise of Google's version of a notebook, you'd want something that can run the offline versions of Google Docs that ChromeOS has (not the Android versions that seems geared more towards consumption) and the tablet apps that Android has. So it's a 2-in-1 that's an Android tablet AND an Android notebook.

(And honestly, I think this also points out how weak Google's OSes are outside the smartphone space. Android still doesn't have the sort of high-end creation apps for tablets that iPad and Surface have, and ChromeOS doesn't have the sort of productivity apps the Windows, OS X or even Linux offer.)

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