Recode.net

How good is the stripped-down, low-cost laptop these days?

On a recent episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask, Recode’s Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Lauren Goode interviewed Lauren’s boss at The Verge, Dieter Bohn, to take a deep dive into the particular merits and flaws of Chromebooks. They also answered listeners’ questions, and Kara told a story of a co-worker who, in the early days of the internet, asked her if she was writing about CB radios.

You can read some of the highlights from their discussion at that link, or listen to it in the audio player above. Below, we’ve posted a lightly edited complete transcript of their conversation.

If you like this, be sure to subscribe to Too Embarrassed to Ask on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn or Stitcher.

Kara Swisher: All right. if you missed last week’s episode, we rounded up all the most interesting gadgets at CES, and you can find that wherever you found this episode. Everybody liked that episode, they seemed to enjoy it.

Lauren Goode: They liked talking about the smart hairbrush.

KS: No, they did not — they found my incredibly philosophical take on the fact it’s the meaningless of life that these kind of gadgets bring. But that’s another issue.

LG: Somebody told me they really liked your joke about “Intel inside” when they told you about the Intel barf bags. [KS laughs] That was pretty good. I listened to that one again. It was funny the second time around, too.

KS: Oh good. Well, I try to entertain as best I can.

LG: Today, we’re going to be talking about something else from CES. Something that people might actually use, which are Chromebooks. Chromebooks are cheap, lightweight laptops based on Google software, and we saw quite a few in Vegas, a couple of new notable ones. And here to chat about them with us, we have the Verge’s executive editor, and my boss, Dieter Bohn.

KS: And Dieter, wait a second, you had a billboard at Vegas.

Dieter Bohn: [laughs] Yeah, we did a show live on Twitter.

KS: And it deserved a billboard? What are you, Celine Dion?

Yeah yeah, just washed up, just like she is.

KS: It’s all a photograph, right? They do photographs and then they go up?

No, we do a little video thing. We did a thing where I was wearing VR goggles and Nilay took a selfie.

KS: But it looked like you were looking off, like you were about to like do some Adele song, like, “Hellooo.” [LG laughs]

Yeah, I’m getting ready for like my sequined suit that I’m going to do ...

KS: Yeah, although I have to say, Nilay actually enjoyed it, I could see that.

Oh God, of course he did.

KS: It was horrifying on some level. It was like, listen ... Who was I was trying to think he was like? Like the guys with the lions there. Siegfried and Roy. That’s what it felt like to me. And I feel like you guys could really have an act and just stay there and never came back.

LG: That would have been fun, if we had a big cat on the set.

Just a giant cat. Like a proper cat, though, not an actual lion or tiger.

KS: Not your fat cat. [laughter]

LG: Like a proper cat.

KS: A proper cat. I think that would be dangerous. I feel like Jim Bankoff wouldn’t pay for that, and it would be a tragedy, but fascinating to watch, I’m sure. So tell us about Chromebooks, what came out at CES?

So there were a handful that came out, Acer and Asus both released kind of bog-standard Chromebooks. But the big one that came out, the most important ones, were two Chromebooks from Samsung. They’re called the Chromebook Plus and the Chromebook Pro.

KS: Mm, those are new and interesting names.

Yeah, well, they’re pretty terrible names, actually. But you can think of them as the flagship Chromebook for at least the next few months. They’re the Chromebooks that Google probably should have had released for the holiday season, but didn’t get them out the door in time.

What’s interesting about them is, they’ve got a touchscreen like a lot of Chromebooks, but they also come with a stylus, which means that you can do things like draw on them. That’s important because they also run Android apps, and the big theme for Chromebooks for the next 12 months is going to be, “What are Android apps on Chrome OS going to look like?”

KS: Ah.

LG: So just to take a step back a little bit, maybe for people who haven’t used a Chromebook before but have certainly heard about them at this point, what’s the difference between a Chromebook running Chrome OS versus, let’s say, your standard PC or Mac? And what’s the difference between a Chrome OS Chromebook and one that’s running Android apps?

Sure. So, the basic idea of a Chromebook is that it’s a laptop that only runs the Chrome web browser, and that’s all that it does. And that sounds really limiting and bad, but it turns out that there’s a lot of really good web apps from Google and everybody else. And on top of there being a lot of good just web apps, if you really step back and look at what you do on a computer, probably the vast majority of you might discover that 90 percent of it is either done in a browser or it’s done in something that could just as easily be done in a browser.

And for most people, it’s that last 10 percent of photo editing, video editing and games that don’t work inside Chrome. And the thing that’s happening to Chrome OS is, in addition to just running a Chrome web browser, they’re adding the ability to run real Android apps on it. And so that’s in beta right now and it’s a little bit ... what’s the word? It’s a technical term ... janky [laughs] right now. But over the next few months they’re going to be putting out the latest version of Android on Chrome OS, and then the Android apps on Chrome OS are going to be a little bit less janky.

KS: Okay, because they’re janky. I have one.

They’re real janky.

There’s two problems with Android apps in a big-screen format like this. One, and this has been a perennial problem with Android, is all Android apps are pretty bad at a tablet size. They have not done a good job. Even Google’s own apps have not done a great job making them work on a big screen.

The second problem that’s specific to Chrome OS right now is you can’t dynamically resize the Android windows, so you either have it look like a little phone sitting on your desktop or you have it look like a badly formed tablet sitting on your desktop and you can’t choose what size the window is. And that’s the big thing that’s coming when Android Nougat, the next version of Android that’s out on phones right now, becomes available on Chrome OS.

KS: So why are they so inexpensive? I bought one for China, because I just was going to toss it out, and it was like $112 or something like that. I spend more on a latte in San Francisco. [DB laughs] So explain how it works in general and why it’s so inexpensive, because they really are cheap.

Well, the parts are cheap. You look at a Chromebook and most of the parts are basically phone parts. They don’t have a ton of RAM, which is what you run your programs off of. They don’t have a ton of storage, but you don’t need a ton of storage because it’s just a browser, right? And their processors are generally pretty dinky. Some of them have really hefty, powerful Intel processors, but for the most part that’s not super necessary.

And so you add all those things up and it comes to a relatively small bill of sale. The cost comes from how nice do you make the actual physical thing, and most Chromebook makers, even this so-called flagship Chromebook Plus and Chromebook Pro, haven’t made it feel like a beautiful, perfect [thing], like Macbook.

KS: No, and kids use them a lot. My kids use them in school.

LG: Yeah, why are they so big in the education market? Is it just because of the price?

It’s because of the price and it’s also because they’re ...

KS: You can’t do much with them.

Well, they’re essentially stateless. So I used to set up computers, way back in the day, for a classroom. It was a middle school room, and the amount of work that you would have to go through to get Windows set up in those classrooms is actually pretty monumental. You need to learn how to flash these computers, you need to make sure that when one kid logs off and the next kid logs on that their stuff is still there, and on and on and on and on. With a Chromebook, you just open it up, you log into your Google account and five minutes later all your bookmarks, all your stuff is there.

KS: And then when you sign out ...

And when you sign out it’s gone. So it works really well for schools, because they can hand them out and not worry about them getting lost, because they’re cheap, and not worry about if they don’t give one to everybody — you can walk into any classroom, open it up, type in your Google account, and bam, you’ve got all your stuff.

KS: That’s how they work it. It’s really fascinating. I remember the old days when Apple was the thing and everyone would save box tops for Apple.

LG: And they’re still trying that with iPad, by the way.

Yeah. In the education market, you can get an iPad that allows multiple accounts, even though you can’t do it anywhere else on the planet with iOS.

KS: Well, I can tell you: In schools, they’re using Chromebooks almost completely.

LG: Yeah, makes sense.

Yeah, and it’s the biggest market for Chromebook, so when you look at Chromebook sales I think they recently passed Macs, at least they did that last quarter. It’s almost all schools. I do think there is a real genuine case for regular consumers going out and getting them, but the vast majority of their sales come from schools.

LG: Yeah. IBC is the firm I think we rely on the most for data around the PC market, and they don’t often break out Chromebooks from other types of laptops. So let’s say Samsung makes Chromebooks, but they also make Windows PCs, and it’s hard to know, if they have a great quarter, which device is being sold. But IBC does tend to note, quarter after quarter, that Chromebooks are doing great and it’s especially in K through 12, and they’re expected to just keep growing.

And I happened to buy one for a family member recently too, because it was so inexpensive. Her laptop was on the fritz, and I said, “Okay, I’m buying you a Chromebook.”

But what can you absolutely not do with a Chromebook? Like people who are thinking of buying one, going in, what do you need to know?

I would say that the things that you absolutely cannot do are video editing — there are some Android apps that can do that, but realistically, because the processors are so small and because most of the Android software was designed with phones in mind, you’re looking at a pretty horrific experience, trying to do proper video editing.

You can do photo editing, either with Android apps — Adobe’s got some Creative Cloud stuff — or, like, with a bunch of different web apps, but it’s really not great.

And then the third thing you really can’t do is play any kind of serious game. There’s a million, of course, Android games, and there’s some web games and so on and so forth, but if you want anything beyond casual gaming, you’re pretty much doomed. If you want to do proper PC gaming, you should just get a PC.

KS: It’s also not the best [keyboard]. It doesn’t feel great, I have to say. I don’t like doing emails on them. I don’t like the experience. It’s like wearing a paper hat, you know what I mean? That’s what it feels like. It feels cheap when you’re using it, to me. I didn’t like using it, the one day that I used it in China.

Right, a bunch of them, they physically feel cheap. And then I think there’s like a psychological thing where ...

KS: Yeah, I don’t know what to do with it. You can’t move it around.

It’s a different Windows experience, figuring out how to move that stuff around is weird. But there’s also, in the back of your mind, that this isn’t a full-on real computer. And so you have this vague sense of, “Oh, there’s thing that I could do that I can’t do here.”

We talked before about how I love to customize my computers will all kinds of crap, and you just can’t do that with a Chromebook. You get what you get and you either figure out if you can work with that or you don’t.

KS: Right.

LG: Would you ever bring a Chromebook — like when we go to cover events, we’ll process a bunch of different photos, sometimes we’re grabbing videos off of websites, storing it on our desktop, throwing it into a post, and that sort of thing. Can a Chromebook handle that kind of load? Would you ever bring a Chromebook to cover an event like CES?

I think you’d have to be a real expert at getting around the limitations on a Chromebook in order to make that happen. To me, again, this is the 90/10 rule. For me, at my job, I could do 90 percent of what I do on a Chromebook and be, actually, pretty happy and actually have it be a little less complicated than it is on my Mac. But it’s the other 10 percent — and the 10 percent is different for everybody — that really keeps me from being able to use it, say, at an event.

My personal weird example is, at an event, sometimes I need to take photos live during a presentation and have them up on the internet within five seconds. There’s no way to do that really easily on a Chromebook, but I know how to do it on a Mac. For somebody else, it might be games; for somebody else, it might be editing video, whatever it might be.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t buy one, but I think that they still, for most people, make a much, much better secondary computer than they do primary computer. Unless you’re pretty confident you don’t need that last 10 percent.

LG: Right, one of the things — this is maybe an irrational fear — but one of the fears I had when I got my family member a Chromebook recently was I also gave her a thumb drive with a video on it that I had made for her. I made her this video for Christmas, it was footage of another family member of ours that had passed away, and she was really excited to have this footage. And I thought to myself, “Okay, when she sticks this thumb drive into her Chromebook when she gets home, and then she wants to put the video somewhere that I’ve given to her ..." And she said it worked out fine, she was able to watch it, I’m guessing she put it into some type of cloud account and then was able to watch it through the cloud.

Maybe she put it in Google drive or something like that. But that was my fear, that once you start passing heavy media around, how does it handle heavy media?

KS: It doesn’t, really.

Well, you need to upload it to a cloud account. Chromebooks often come with 500 [gigabytes] or a terabyte or some amount of storage in Google Drive. But if you want to try and use it with Microsoft stuff, actually it works halfway decently. Microsoft Office apps on the Android, they’ve done a lot of work to customize them for Chromebooks. So you could theoretically use a Chromebook but live in Microsoft’s cloud instead of Google’s cloud.

KS: Oh, these clouds. What about malware?

Malware is less of a problem on Chromebooks than it is on anything else because the thing can just start clean, pretty much anytime. Now again, this might be a thing where because there’s less of a surface area for people to attack and there’s less interest in attacking it because there’s less valuable data on it than on Macs or PCs, there might be less of it. But I will tell you that if you’re worried about malware, especially if you’re giving a laptop to a family member who’s not super computer literate, I think Chromebook is probably the way to go.

I spent three hours cleaning spyware and malware off of a Macintosh over the holidays. Which is something I never expected to do, because my default for years has always been, “Oh, get your family member a Mac, you won’t have to do tech support. And if they need it, they can go to the store.” That’s still true, but with a Chromebook there’s even less, because there’s just less stuff to break or do.

KS: What had they done that made three hours’ worth [of clean-up] on a Mac? Did they download every stupid ...

Just insane, weird browser things.

KS: Like, “lick this picture because you look pretty.” That kind of thing?

Yeah, that kind of thing.

KS: I’m going to be checking my computer. [laughter] I don’t think I’m that stupid.

All right, in a minute we’re going to take some questions from our readers and listeners about Chromebooks, which we got a lot of questions about. But first I want to tell you about Code Media, an exclusive two-day event that’s coming in February.

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KS: Every week we take questions from our readers and listeners. You can send them in, by the way, by tweeting at us with the hashtag #tooembarrassed, or you can email tooembarrassed@recode.net. This week we asked questions about Chromebooks. First question, Lauren Goode?

LG: First question is from Navot Volk, @NavotVolk on Twitter, who asks, “Can they run apps already? Let’s say Microsoft Office #tooembarrassed.” You just started to answer that, Dieter.

I did. I will say, there is a caveat. Not every single Chromebook works on the new beta that runs Android apps. And so you should check before you buy to make sure that it does. But going forward, it’s going to be the standard.

And, in fact, I heard that going forward the standard is also going to be for everything high end or midrange to include that stylus so that you’ll be able to use it to draw on stuff. And that stylus, by the way, isn’t like the Samsung Note stylus. I mean, it looks like the Samsung Note stylus, but it’s built into Chrome and Android, so it’s not just Samsung that will be able to use that stuff, it’s any Chrome OS laptop.

LG: Oh, that’s pretty cool. So is this all a part of the eventual merging of the Android and Chrome OS?

KS: Oh my God, that story, that story. Who cares but Dieter Bohn?

A lot of people care.

KS: No, they don’t.

LG: Many people care.

KS: [whispering] They don’t. FYI, they don’t.

There’s a rumor about this thing called Andromeda ...

KS: They do at The Verge but nowhere else.

If it happens, it’s going to happen later and differently. It’s almost like the wrong question to ask. There’s going to be a bunch of Android stuff that feels more like Chrome. And there’s going to be a bunch of Chrome stuff that feels more like Android. They’re going to start to feel more like each other and maybe they’ll make a new OS someday.

KS: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. I am so excited.

Yeah, that’s exactly right, [laughter]

KS: Mason Holcomb: “When will we see more powerful applications like Adobe Creative cloud working on Chromebooks?” Is that the 12th of Never, Dieter?

Yeah, so — it’s funny. I’ve heard that Adobe, they made a bunch of Creative Cloud versions of their apps for Android. Or a bunch of Android versions of the Creative Cloud apps for Android. And they put them out in the world, and they’re like, “Well, nobody wants real apps.” And then all the users got it and were pissed because they’re hampered, broken ...

LG: Watered-down versions.

KS: Hampered. Who wants hampered?

So Adobe is apparently thinking about making more powerful versions that will be able to run on these Chromebooks.

LG: That’d be really cool. Then you can use, like, your Lightroom and your Photoshop and your Element. And what’s the audio one that they use?

KS: No idea.

LG: There’s so many.

KS: Al right, well, then they’re not going to put out crappier versions.

But I wouldn’t hold your breath for them to be desktop class. I really would not.

KS: Interesting.

LG: Oh yeah, Audition. I was going to say Audible but I knew that wasn’t right.

KS: All right. Next one, Lauren.

LG: Okay, next one is from F. Reed. He’s @2LowTech on Twitter, that’s a good Twitter handle. “Do Android apps on Chromebooks make CBs a viable PC alternative?” Okay, so Dieter Bohn. You are looking at, let’s just say, a lower-cost PC, to keep it in the same price-range here. Or you’re looking at a Chromebook running Android apps and running it well. Which one are you going to get?

I’m going to get the Chromebook, because I would rather have a thing that I know just works and is good at the things that it’s good at than a thing that is kind of junky but pretending to be better than it is.

If I’m spending $500-ish on a laptop, I’m getting a Chromebook. Also, I just want to point out that we are not going to let calling Chromebooks CBs be a thing. I know you had to fit your tweet into 140 characters so I’m giving you a pass, F. Reed. But in the future, just to be clear, we’re not going to call them CBs.

LG: We’re not calling them CBs, it’s reserved for Circuit Breaker, our gadget blog at the Verge.

Or Citizens Band radio.

LG: Or... [laughs]

KS: Nobody does that. I’m calling them CBs.

Dammit.

KS: Dammit. I’m going to call them CBs.

LG: CB radio!

KS: Yeah. I told you my story about that. When I started at the Journal?

LG: Yeah, you were reporting on CB radio. They wanted you to report on AOL.

KS: I know, I got the internet beat, and literally — you know those high-and-mighty media reporters who now have been decimated? This one came up to me and said, “Oh, you’re covering CB radio, right?” Like that. Like in that kind of way. It was such a mean-girl thing — I mean, like, it was a boy, of course it was a boy, but it was a mean-girl thing. And I was like, “I am covering the thing that is going to decimate your industry. So there.” Well, mine too. Anyway ...

LG: And then you got put on the AOL beat.

KS: No, no, no, I was on the internet, I was the only internet reporter. I was it.

If someone did that to me today I’d actually fight back and say, “Actually, Citizens Band is making a comeback,” because people are finding ways to use it to do mesh networking to get on the internet.

KS: I wouldn’t do that.

LG: Ohhh, cool! Put it on the site, put it on the site.

KS: Go ahead.

LG: I think cathode-ray TVs are coming back.

KS: No, they’re not. I just got rid of one.

LG: I know, we talked about this, and I said you should have kept it so we could tinker. And you were like, “Oh God, no.”

KS: I don’t tinker, I’m not tinkering.

LG: Okay, next one is from Utterly Random Techie, another fun Twitter handle. “Is there a chance Google will make another Chromebook Pixel?” And Dieter Bohn has the scoop on this.

The answer is yes. I was told that Google is not giving up on this form factor, this form factor being a screen and a keyboard. And I also have a pretty strong hunch that they’re thinking pretty seriously about tablet form factors as well, maybe with a detachable keyboard.

KS: This is a hunch, or you’re just making it up, or have you reported up on this? I feel like no.

I have a hunch. A good hunch.

KS: Uh-huh, all right.

A hunch that I feel strongly enough to say on a podcast.

KS: An itch at the back of your neck or something?

LG: Just like I had a hunch that the next operating system was going to be called Nougat.

KS: All right, all right.

Oh my God. If you look at the new version of Chrome that’s on Samsung’s Chromebook, the icons on the taskbar on the bottom are really big so you can hit them with a finger. So they’re maybe starting to make Chrome OS usable without ...

KS: Sort of optimize ...

Yeah, think about it.

LG: So if they came out with something that was a tablet with a detachable keyboard, and stylus, they’re essentially competing with the Surfaces of the world.

Yep., they’re getting there. They’re competing with the Surface RTs of the world.

LG: [laughs] Yeah, that’s right.

Womp-womp. Yeah, that’s a deep nerd cut.

LG: Yeah. ARM. Nope, some people are excited about ARM again, so ...

KS: All right.

LG: Next question. Why don’t you do it?

KS: I shall. @Trick202. Mm, that sounds like they might be fondling things. “Would love to know about editing video on a Chromebook. The only thing I’m struggling with, to be honest.”

KG: Well Rich, you’re struggling with it because you can’t do it.

You can, but ...

KS: It’s hard.

Yeah. It’s going to be an uphill slog, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

LG: Hmm, I used a cloud-based video editing application once. It was more like a graphics or animation ... totally cloud-based. It was frustrating.

KS: All right, why do it?

LG: It was a while ago. I don’t know, I was trying it out. I was trying new tools ...

KS: No, you cannot. Fondler. [laughter]

LG: Okay, next question is from Joseph Bullivant, who I believe has written in to us before, so Joseph, thanks for listening to Too Embarrassed to Ask. “How functional are Chromebooks without an internet connection?” This is a great question. Does anything work offline?

Yeah, absolutely. A bunch of the web apps actually work offline. Especially if they’re Google’s stuff, so Google Docs, Google Keep ...

KS: Mail.

I guess email could technically work offline, but you can’t send it til you get back online. And then, if you have one that runs Android apps, all those Android apps will do whatever Android apps normally do when they work offline. So you actually can do quite a bit more than you might expect, but the big problem is if you think you’re going to use this thing and use it offline all the time, don’t forget that most of these Chromebooks come with a pittance of storage. They’re really designed to get stuff up into the cloud and then interact with it there. So if you leave it offline and do a bunch of photo stuff on it somehow for a week or two, you’re going to just end up running out of space really quickly.

LG: Oh yeah. Do you have to connect to the internet to set it up initially? I would think yes, right?

I think yes.

LG: So you can never really air gap a Chromebook.

That makes sense.

LG: There’s a security flaw right there.

KS: I see that. Again, I have a Macbook. All right, [from @Yawnoctrm], “What’s happened to the midrange CB …” [laughter]

Goddamnit.

KS: “Barely any progression from Acer C720, Toshiba CB2…” Oh, more Cs. “New devices equals money. $$$.”

LG: Lots of money.

The price has gone up a little bit on a bunch of stuff. Now, Asus did announce a new version of the Chromebook Flip, which I really liked the last version of and it’s got really good specs, but it’s $500.

KS: Is that a lot?

It’s the upper end.

LG: So the range you’re talking about is actually not that great, and I don’t want to minimize how much money this might be for people, but you’re talking [at] the low end, $150, right?

Yeah.

LG: And then the high end, you’re talking $500.

$500 [to] $600, yeah.

LG: So the midrange is really not that ...

The midrange is somewhere between like $250 and $450.

KS: I’ve seen them for less than that, like $102 or something like that, some of them.

Yeah, the weird thing about Chromebook is you can get the ultra-cheap one, but what I want is for Chrome to say, “Hey, you shouldn’t have more than five tabs.” It should give you a warning at some point, saying this is too many tabs, because it really can start to slow down pretty badly if you’ve got the low-end stuff.

LG: Okay, final question.

KS: Go ahead.

LG: This is from Yavuz I, that’s [@save_shot] on Twitter. “What’s the difference between the Samsung Chromebook Pro and the Samsung Chromebook Plus? Only processors? If so, what’s the benefit?”

The only difference is the processor. The Plus has an ARM-based processor and the Pro has an Intel-based processor. So the benefit of an Intel processor is that Chrome runs better on an Intel processor.

LG: Is it an Atom?

It’s an M3. Which is the new generation, Intel doesn’t want to call it M but it’s M, blah blah.

What’s funny is that I hear tell that the Pro runs Android apps better than the Plus even though Android is usually written for ARM. Basically, if you can afford to spend the extra money, we don’t know how much extra money, to get the Pro, I’d strongly recommend it. I think that you’re going to have a much better experience if you can get that faster processor. But that’s all it comes down to. There’s no compatibility issues, they all do the exact same stuff, but with the Intel version you’re going to be able to have a few more tabs and they’re all going to run a little bit faster.

KS: All right.

LG: I actually have one more question for you. So when the Pixel first came out, it was $1,200?

[laughs] It was ridiculous.

LG: Okay, is there ever going to be a market for that level of Chromebook?

No? Maybe? It really depends on whether or not Google can convince Android app makers to make good Android apps that run well on Chromebooks so that people can stop worrying about whether or not there are quote-unquote “desktop-class apps” available for this thing to justify spending that much money on the something. And given Google’s history of utterly failing to get good, large-screen Andoid apps, I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in that.

I guess the flip side of that is there’s always a market for ridiculously overpriced, well-designed technology. Anybody can sell 100,000 of anything. So they’ll probably make one just for the hell of it. I don’t expect that, when we look at market share and how people are using this thing, that it’ll have a big impact.

LG: They should bundle in the Pixel in the next $1,300 Chromebook. You spend $1,300 and you get the next Pixel Chromebook and you get a Pixel phone.

Pixel, phone by Google.

LG: [laughs] Right, phone by Google.

KS: Are there not enough gadgets for you to fondle?

LG: No, I’m just saying, a bundle would be ... [laughter] All right.

KS: That’s a lot of gadgets.

LG: I should have never said the word “fondle.”

KS: You walked right into that one!

LG: This is totally my fault.

KS: Dieter, this is very helpful. So you like these new ones? You were impressed by it at CES?

Um, I wasn’t disappointed. I think that the main thing with these Samsung Chromebooks is they look like Chromebooks. They’re not like, “Oh my God, this is a beautiful piece of technology, this is incredibly good hardware.” It’s like, “Fine.”

KS: Never happening? That beautiful piece of technology?

Well, the last time we saw it on a Chromebook was Google’s own Pixel, which was $1,200. [laughs]

KS: Right, so ...

Yeah, I guess the moral of the story is if something looks great and looks beautiful, people are going to charge a premium for it.

KS: That is what it’s like in relationships too, just so you know! [laughter] Pro tip.

LG: Next episode ... [laughter] Tinder. [laughter]

KS: Pro tip for you there, Dieter.

All right, this has been another great episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask. Dieter, again, thank you for joining us.

LG: Yes Dieter, thank you for joining us.

It’s been fun, thanks.

KS: And congratulations on your act in Vegas, I’m so looking forward to it. Your upcoming marriage with Celine Dion, it’s going to be great.

LG: People can actually watch all the episodes on theverge.com. All three episodes that were on Twitter live.

KS: Yes, they’re very good.

LG: So go to theverge.com and check those out.

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