Would you lease a Web-only laptop for $20/month? That’s the student package price that Google looks to be aiming at with their new Chrome laptop lease promotion. This package includes both hardware and access to online services.
These Chromium notebooks aren’t just Web-based. They’re Web-only. It’s a browser. There’s no hard-drive. Everything you do happens on the cloud. Your documents. Your presentations. Your files. All saved in real-time, and stored on Google’s servers for everywhere access.
While Amazon’s cloud hiccup the other day which temporarily kept companies from accessing their cloud-hosted information, this sort of Cloud-only service may scare some people off. But, it’s probably the mainstream future.
And Google is probably looking to see how these student versions do, before going consumer- or business-side with it.