Today was a productive day although it was disappointing that I couldn’t go for my walk in the morning because of the rain and by the time it cleared up it was already too late. On Sunday I’ll go for a walk and may even take my mobile phone with me so that I can listen to either some music or podcasts to keep my mind occupied because as much as i like being alone with my own thoughts, after a while it does become incredibly boring. On Monday I’ve got a blood test that I’ve been putting off primarily because there is no great urgency but the doctor has gotten back to me so I may as well follow those marching orders – highly unlikely things have changed since my last blood test.
Although I’ve used YouShop the biggest problem is that they have a maximum value size of $2000. I originally thought like a soft limit in terms of “yeah, we’ll carry something more than $2000 but it is only insured up to $2000 but I’ve since learned that it is a hard limit. I’ve had a look at myUS and I think have used it in the past way back when I was living down in Christchurch. One of the things I’m interested in is using it to purchase a Pixel 11 Pro XL and a Pixel Watch rather than going to a local retailer given the horrendous markups and the limited selection that is available in New Zealand. With all that being said, Samsung does have the benefit of a great IoT ecosystem with the Samsung television I have serving as a hub for all the devices.
The Googlebook looks to be a great step in creating an end to end ecosystem however I am waiting for them release of a mini-PC like back when there were vendors offering Chromebox devices along side laptops. I think there is a lot of potential for the Googlebook OS to really overtake Windows particularly if there is eventually an option to install Googlebook OS on a generic hardware in much the same way that ChromeOS Flex was offered for people with older hardware. There is talk about bringing Googlebook OS to existing ChromeOS devices so maybe Googlebook OS Flex could be delivered but minus the AI enhancements (I assume the AI enhancements are dependent on a built in NPU being available on the machine).
What I think is particularly good about what Google has done with the launch of Googlebooks from third party partners is the fact that the laptops aren’t cheap crappy low spec garbage like the current crop of Chromebooks that are available in retail stores. They’re launch premium devices with good hardware specifications, great build quality and the factt hat updates for Googlebook OS will be coming straight from Google rather than the current situation of hoping an praying that your OEM phone vendor of choice gets their ass into gear and puts together a timely update that isn’t completely broken and supported for a decent number of years. I think the icing on the cake is the fact that the Googlebook will come with 10 years of updates – that puts the Googlebook head to head with the sort of enterprise support that Microsoft has with Windows.
