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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

Will be interesting to see what price this comes in at. If they can get this significantly below $1000 it could be an absolute killer.

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It's anything even remotely close to $1000 I wouldn't go near it if it's running Chrome OS. I'm not paying a grand for a fancy browser case.

Edit: to expand on my comment a little. I thought the premise of Chrome OS was that except for specialized cases almost a "typical" user things could be moved to the cloud, eliminating the need for high powered machines and complex OSes that can fulfill various use cases, consequently the price drops dramatically. If Chrome OS is still limited to essentially web/cloud driven functionality what is the justification for the high price point?

All of the chromebooks so far have been able to run non-chromeos linux distros just fine. (The ARM-based ones require a little effort, but it's possible. I've got fedora/arm on a Samsung chromebook that I play around with) Hopefully that will be the case with this device as well.

The 13" Retina MacBook Pro starts at $1700. We'll have to see what the final specs and pricing are for the Pixel but it could be very compelling. A high-DPI display is really a killer feature.

Sure, the default OS on this laptop may be limited, but that doesn't change the fact that the hardware is still that of a $1000+ laptop. Especially with that hi-res screen. And I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could install Ubuntu on it.

These devices are only sensible if the UI of the OS knows how to scale; otherwise everything is tiny. From a brief Google search, Ubuntu does not know how to scale (http://askubuntu.com/questions/231646/is-ubuntu-12-10-optimi...) so I don't think you would want to run Ubuntu on this.

I think they can hit 400-500$ price point by using a ARM 15 chip. Chrome already runs in HiDPi on nexus 10 and retina MacBook pros. I am interested about the scaling they will use here.

The Nexus 10 was $400 with very similar resolution (2560x1600). But this would be using a bigger screen, which probably means it's more expensive (although less PPI than Nexus 10). So I hope it's somewhere between $500-$600. $500 would be the sweet spot, though. And I think they can only achieve that with ARM chips, and with reasonable performance.

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