I'm having a rant this month, but not about some mere gadget I don't like. It's more important than that: I'm unhappy about a whole computing ecosystem that's being foisted on us.
You are probably aware of cloud computing — doing large amounts of our computing using massive servers in remote locations. We all use cloud to some extent. Whole companies and government departments are turning over swathes of their IT to cloud to excellent effect in terms of monetary savings, increased business agility and many other things.
As consumers, too, we benefit from cloud-based applications from Hotmail and Gmail to Facebook and Twitter to Flickr, Dropbox and all sorts. To this extent, where it facilitates a convenient service to draw on, cloud is a good thing. And it's a growing thing, too, both in the B2B and consumer worlds. Apple has announced a new service called iCloud, which also sounds promising, even though it's rather difficult to understand. (Full details weren't known at the time of writing.) The iCloud is not, however, as Steve Jobs has pointed out, "a big computer in the sky," where all your stuff will live. And who, indeed, would want to have all their stuff — documents, photos, archived emails, music, etc – stored (not just backed up, mind, but exclusively resident) on a commercial entity's servers, in another country and available to you only when you have an internet connection?
I can't imagine many of you (probably reading this on a flight and about to get your laptop out to work or perhaps, as I recently did on a 12-hour flight, sort out a photo collection) would welcome opening your laptop to find it has no data at all on it, because it's all on a cloud server and unavailable to you because you're not online.
And yet this ridiculous idea is currently being touted, and welcomed all round with oohs and aahs by two of my favourite technology companies — Google and Samsung. Acer will also have joined the lunacy by the time you read this. I have before me the beautifully designed £400 Samsung Chromebook, which, like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, has no brain. It only works — as in, has any usable function at all — if there's WiFi. It doesn't even take wired connection (all there is in most hotels) or a 3G SIM card.
So a Chromebook, unless you have something like the (utterly brilliant) 3 MiFi gadget, which creates a WiFi hotspot out of the 3G signals, could be the world's most pointless laptop — elegant, but useless.
There's no price advantage — £400 will buy you a very nice Dell, HP or, indeed, Samsung. It has a good battery life, mostly because it doesn't have much of a job to do. There is an advantage that if you lost it or left it at home, you could access all your stuff from another computer. Fair enough. But it remains the most unappealing technology I've come across in years. Having all your precious data elsewhere makes you feel like everything is muffled and insulated from you. Even with a good WiFi connection, when you write on Google Docs, the only way to create documents, there's a very slight delay with everything you do. It soon drives you insane.
Turn on your Chromebook on the train or plane to scribble a note and it says it can't help because you're not online. Send a document created on the Chromebook to a PC and the best you'll get is your beautifully formatted document appearing in plain text as an email. Send a Microsoft Office document to the Chromebook and up comes a message to say it can't deal with that 'Unknown File Type'. The whole thing is like some horrible municipal thing you'd get given to use at school, which is where I suspect these Chromebooks will end up.
Basing a supposed technological advance on the nerdy, unreal belief that wireless internet connections — all internet connections, indeed — aren't flaky and unreliable is plain nuts. The whole thing, should it succeed, will prove my contention that the geek really will inherit the Earth.
Follow Jonathon Margolis at twitter.com/SimplyBestTech
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