Asus Chromeboxes are almost here!

It's been a month since I first went on about a new Chromebox from Asus (see here), but they have finally arrived... almost.  AnandTech is reporting (here) that the boxes are available for pre-order Newegg, Amazon, and TigerDirect.  The one change from the initial press release is that the systems are not going to be fanless.  The fans are supposed to be variable speed and not required to run all the time so noise shouldn't be a major issue.  However, I do miss the whole "no moving parts" thing.  As a plan to use these for a replacement for a thin client I do wonder how the fan will affect it's longevity.  I guess I'd rather have the box running cooler, but moving parts are more likely to fail that solid state parts.  I just hope they chose to use high quality parts in their fans.

An affordable Chromebox.... Finally

I really like the idea of ChromeOS devices for school use.  Think about it, automatic updating, very narrow attack vector, fast boot, plain and simple operation.  What's not to like about it? Ok ok I understand, everything has to be web-based.  But is that so bad?  Really, how often is your connection to the internet down?  I know lots of people talk about how good the cloud is and a lot of people preach about how bad the cloud is.  Wait a minute, I'm getting side tracked, I'll save this topic for another post, let's move on to what I was wanting to talk about.

Chromeboxes.  More importantly, affordable Chromeboxes.  Asus has announced a new Chromebox starting at $179 (really, read about it here http://www.asus.com/us/News/xjbJtLA1HEyUSUeo).  That's pretty cheap, right?  But you might be saying the Samsung Chromeboxes for $300 or $500 were affordable too.  Yes, they were affordable, until you consider that you can buy a refurbished computer for $500 (with a monitor.)  That's a full PC too, it runs Windows and everything.  Chrome versus Windows is going to be another post.

Back to the affordable Chromeboxes, in education every dollar counts, $179 is much more affordable than $300.  That's a lot more computers being made available for the students.  I'll call that a win.

Now for my rant.

Chromeboxes have been out for some time.  Just a small computer that runs ChromeOS, nothing particularly special.  The prices have been ridiculously high though.  Before today's announcement they were around $300 dollars.  That doesn't sound too bad for a computer.  But, Samsung has a whole Chromebook for $249.  Some might point out that that's obviously different because it's an ARM processor and the Chromeboxes all have Intel processors.  I could care less about that.  I need a computer that runs, the ARM based Chromebooks do that just fine.  Why not strip out the portable bits of a Chromebook and squeeze them into a super small package?  How much could you save if you cut off the screen, battery, keyboard and trackpad?