Thin client, thick client, cloud, local, etc, these are all only relevant to technical people. Focus on use-cases. What does the Pixel let you do that a Macbook Pro does not? Have access to all your documents from anywhere (over internet connections of various levels of unreliability?) No, because you can do all that on a Macbook Pro. Does taking away the ability to do things locally improve the user experience in some other way? Arguably, it improves maintainability and makes the UI easier to use.
Is that the target market for the Pixel? People whose main concern is reducing maintenance burden and having an easier to use interface? Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?
> Arguably, it improves maintainability and makes the UI easier to use
When your entire OS is cloud based, I think you get some synergies - you can reliably sit down at any computer and everything "just works" with all your state exactly how you left when you got up from the previous one.
So yes, you could purchase a Mac Pro, but because it's not cloud based from the ground up there are massive gobs of local state such that you continually need to worry about sync'ing things here there and everywhere, installing apps everywhere, etc. So in world where the default thinking for every application is to store local state, removing the capability for local state is necessary to achieve a true thin client.
> Is that the target market for the Pixel? People whose main concern is reducing maintenance burden and having an easier to use interface?
I think that's not really the selling point of this high end machine. This is Google's statement that cloud based computing is better even for people who do demanding, complex tasks (I'm not saying they are right, but I think it's what they believe).
> Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?
As I said, you're underestimating Google's ambition for what can be done with a thin client. An iPad is not suitable for highly intensive desktop tasks at all. A chromebook has all the physical features of a high end professional laptop, but is 100% cloud based, and thus can be used as a real computer for real tasks.
> A chromebook has all the physical features of a high end professional laptop, but is 100% cloud based, and thus can be used as a real computer for real tasks.
Except it can't. There is a theoretical possible future in which everyone has 40 mbps unmetered LTE and powerful apps exist in web form, but if anything the trend has been the opposite in recent years (carriers eliminating unlimited data plans, apps moving back to native on tablets and phones).
Yep, I completely agree - I'm hugely sceptical about whether this future where we can all rely on high speed network access 100% of the time will ever arrive. But I don't think Google is - they are betting this is coming. And in the meantime they are trying to provide just enough local state (HTML5 style) to get you by during the outages.
> Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?
None of the ones who need to write documents and emails, or edit spreadsheets.
For spreadsheets, it's still less than perfect because Google Spreadsheets are still worse than Excel wrt scripting and managing large datasets. But security, ease of use, and lower maintenance burden might make up for it depending on what your needs are. For my parents, this would be perfect.
Is that the target market for the Pixel? People whose main concern is reducing maintenance burden and having an easier to use interface? Okay, now how many of those people are better served by an iPad?