Another day another Chromebox, or two.

HP announced today that they are going to be offering a Chromebox as well.  Here's their page if you're interested, http://h20435.www2.hp.com/t5/The-Next-Bench-Blog/HP-Chromebox-Chrome-simplicity-tiny-desktop/ba-p/87295.

Google announced their Chromebox for Meetings, too.  Technically it's not a new Chromebox, it's just a bundle that combines the new ASUS Chromebox, a camera, a speaker, a mic, and a remote.  Here's some of the details from Google on this one, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/02/chromebox-now-for-simpler-and-better.html.

That's pretty amazing isn't it?  It seemed like the manufacturers were just going to let the Chromeboxes wither and die for so long and now they're popping up all over the place.  Check out the Chromebase that LG announced back in December, http://lgnewsroom.com/newsroom/contents/64056.  This one isn't really a Chromebox, but it's definitely not a Chromebook either.

Why is this even relevant to practical school tech?  ChromeOS devices are pretty easy to manage, fairly stable, designed to be reliable (mostly fanless and all solid state), and can be priced pretty cheap.  All important things for the education market.  Now let's see if we can get our hands on some so we can go kick the tires and see if they live up to all this hype.

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?

Troubleshooting Google Chromebook Policies

Using Google Apps to manage policies Chromebook Policies?  Want to know what settings are applied to a device (or user) and when they were last updated?  Then I have found your new best friend, chrome://policy/, just load it up and take a look at what policies are getting applied.

chome://policy

The key pieces of information that I used were the "Last fetched" and "Applies to".

Another handy item listed there is the "Reload policies" button.  It comes in real handy for testing how changes affect the operation of the system.

Now I just have to go check out what this looks like on a Windows system running Chrome.