Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US
theverge.com
theverge.com
People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extremely simple spreadsheets. It's way more important to have cheap, reliable, accessible, safe hardware. You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem. The technology is failing them. Wrestling with an operating system sucks.
And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into.
That said the reality is that the majority of people are the ones that do not want to learn, and thus to be successful it is necessary to cater to them. It makes sense and make their life easier.
But do not fool yourself thinking it's not an educational problem for the "feel good" statement. Learning photoshop is a big deal and it's not because of UX. It's because of the concepts behind the editing.
It seems like a pretty biased view. Apart from the fact that even in HN-like circles for many people most part of their job is just answering e-mails, there's tons of people who don't need anything more than web. I wouldn't consider somebody who mostly does research, reading a lot of stuff and being satisfied with a simple editor "dumb". (there are even quite fine online latex editors too)
You know smart people can prefer a simple, less-modifiable system as well, right? Just because they don't share the HN communities view for an open product doesn't make them less intelligent.
Contrasted with the largely-locked-down proprietary development of Mac OS, whose few open-source concessions were shuttered a decade ago, the notion of Chrome OS being somehow less legitimately hacker-friendly just seems plainly absurd.
The OS itself is pretty open. If I'm not mistaken though, if you put it into dev mode, you get a scary screen at every reboot, and an opportunity to hit space to re-enable OS verification, and apparently wipe out whatever modifications you've made to the system. In theory, actually rebooting the system should be a fairly rare event, but that's one of the reasons I haven't considered a Chromebook. I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right?
Macs are basically the opposite; the OS itself is closed, but the hardware isn't difficult to install some other OS on. You've got options, because you aren't wedded to the software.
"Difficult" as in a supported developer mode? Of course there is a way to reverse it otherwise they would have non-stop support calls from people who hit the button to see what it did and freaked out. The whole point of Chromebooks is that you can always get back to a usable state no matter what you do to it (even chuck it out the window, just log-in to a new one and you're 100% up and running).
What I'd like: A Linux distro of my choice that boots as cleanly and directly as the original ChromeOS. A dual-boot to Windows would be nice too, although maybe at this point I could get by with a VM.
What I think a Chromebook would provide: The option for a Crouton install within ChromeOS or a dual-boot. I think that both options require developer mode. During boot, you get a fun little screen telling you to push the spacebar to "re-enable OS verification", which takes you into a system recovery process...or you press ctrl-d to boot the system as-is.
That all sounds like something that I can do, but it sounds like a step back in usability for me. And besides:
> Caution: Modifications you make to the system are not supported by Google, may cause hardware, software or security issues and may void warranty.
(http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-fo...)
That's a terrible way to prefix a guide for activating a "supported developer mode" :-)
A Chromebook may be wonderful for someone else with different desires. I don't think that it's a good fit for what I want to do.
[1] - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eGPMu03vCxIO0a3oNX8H...
If I was looking for a weekend project and a cheap machine at the moment, it might be fun to do. It also brings back memories of compiling new drivers to get some hardware working, haha. Likely, I could find similar hardware that doesn't take as much effort to get working the way I'd like.
Thank you for the link.
> we'll actually see a real ARM (well, preferably ARM64) machine one of these days that you can actually develop on, rather than treat just as a development target. The Rasberry PI's, Beagleboards etc are all fun, and all the cellphones and Chromebooks are clearly selling well, but as a developer I feel something is still missing in the market
I don't know why he keeps saying different things on about every occasion.
Only he doesn't (say different things) here. He's talking about the Chromebook as a computer -- he couldn't care less about the Chromebook concept itself and the underlying OS for himself. But he likes the hardware. He himself runs a Chromebook now (used to have a Macbook Air 2-3 years ago), but with the OS wiped and regular Linux installed.
But when it comes to Linux adoption in general, he sees Chromebooks as a positive development.
http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-guide
And there are even a few forks[1], including one that came out this year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_OS#Builds_and_forks
Obviously, the browser has matured. JavaScript has matured. We now have more protocols to work with than just HTTP (SDP for which WebRTC, perfect example. WebSockets). But in my mind the Chromebook is the first step in what is going to become all of personal computing.
Let's put aside mobile for a minute that so changed the landscape towards locally installed that it put Google's revenue model on its heels.
You see WhatsApp, Slack, etc., releasing Electron apps just to try to appear locally installable. If there wasn't such a high demand for it, and people weren't clamoring for a stand-alone app instead of a browser tab, companies would never invest the time and money.
The main issue (for example in OS X) is that everything gets subsumed by the browser process so things like Command+Tab don't work as well. There are, of course, also OS integration issues, but over time I think we'll get pretty far along on that front.
Where performance matters, locally installed software is NOT going away anytime soon. Oh, just take gaming, for example. Good luck making AAA games run in your browser.
which is still about the current figure, per arewefastyet: http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29&view=breakdown&suite=asm...
Not going to cut it for AAA games. Most likely it can be improved significantly with enough work, especially with WebAssembly, but I'll wait until I see it.
Only very small games can be downloaded every time you want to play. Most games have large resources that will need to be cached. But the cache will be large enough that you'll want to surface it to the user, and let them decide what to uninstall, especially on Chromebooks with their puny storage.
Plus games are something you want to be able to play offline.
So we just wind up with Steam, right?
Offline webapps is a thing now. With things like Service Workers hopefully we'll see it more frequently.
To be frank, I don't know how most developers can tolerate writing their code on anything else.
Interesting.
But off the top of my head:
Not all developers work on projects which can be hosted by a third party company and require always-on super-stable internet access.
Most of your arguments seem Windows-oriented (driver updates) or moot with decent CI/CD workflow practices (conflicting SDK versions).
- Speed: Local development environments are just as slow as cloud ones, when not slower (due to compositor hitches, background downloads, heavyweight UI toolkits, all that bullshit). Speed is part of the reason that I ditched local environments.
I can't emphasize enough how little there is to be truly gained from offlining a workspace in terms of performance. When looking beyond pure ideal-world benchmarks and taking the intersecting outliers that impact performance during actual usage into play, the net savings, as I'm trying to convey here, are negative.
- Security: The odds are greater that somebody's going to run a buffer overflow on one of the many undermaintained and/or proprietary services and applications running on your machine (when's the last time someone ran Valgrind against f.lux?) and slipstream a rootkit into it, than that somebody's going to attack your dev server with a zero-day against CentOS (and even if they did, you'd have been just as screwed anyway).
Put another way: which machine is more secure, the one with a dedicated 24/7 threat response team monitoring port access, or the one that gets left unattended on a table at Starbucks every Tuesday afternoon?
- Control: If your development needs more control than root access to the host filesystem, you're doing something wrong, and your codebase is going to be more fragile for it. (Hell, even using root access is a sign that you're being persnickety.)
- Learning: Learning time should be allocated toward the systems involved in what I'm actually building, not a http://www.xkcd.com/1579/ hodgepodge of perpetually-obsolete periphery.
I don't know WTF you're talking about with my examples being Windows-oriented - the driver example I cited was specifically inspired by an issue with my desktop's network adapter on Linux.
I see a lot of excitement about WebAssembly. I also see a lot of people saying how java applets were obviously a bad idea, and deserved the obscurity they fell into.
I don't really understand how to reconcile those viewpoints. :/
Web assembly is a continuation of JavaScript and ASM JS and is poised to be a much better solution for all parties.
With the DOM you don't have to reinvent the numerous wheels it provides (text, images, layout, controls) nor do you have to use the visually inconsistent versions of these applets provided.
Java is also owned by Oracle, and was previously owned by Sun, so its development has/will always be directed by the needs of its owners rather than the community at large.
> Suppose I want to run Quake in the browser. Applets already do that.
I dont think this is the primary motivation for WebAssembly.
> It's not a new idea or a new technology.
Sure, but there are crucial implementation differences (i.e. DOM interaction), differences in the presentation and culture, and political differences.
Second, Java GUI toolkits all sucked and produced ugly UIs. I know some developers liked Swing and people claim it can be made to look native, but I've used hundreds of Swing apps and they never lived up to that promise. For better or for worse, HTML+CSS works well enough and people understand it, so WebAssembly's ability to interact with the DOM is a massive improvement over what was available to Applets.
Third, Sun's ability to secure the JVM plugin was, to be kind, pathetic. WebAssembly should be better since it should inherit a lot of what we already have for JavaScript. For better or for worse, the JVM was just never designed to protect users from the people writing Java code whereas all JavaScript engines were built from the ground up with that in mind. WebAssembly will be built with that same mindset.
Fourth, an open specification vs a closed spec controlled by a single company.
There's probably more reasons, but that covers most of what I hated about Applets that I'm hoping won't be the case with WebAssembly.
Wow, you'd have to wonder how everyone here actually learned how to use computers back when there was no Internet and no help from your friends because you were the only one using them.
It's NEVER been easier to use a computer nowadays, not just because they have become better designed and more user-friendly, but also because documentation and help is readily available everywhere at every corner.
Giving up when facing an issue these days is just called laziness, nothing else.
It's like calling people lazy because they call a refrigeration technician to fix their fridge rather than do it themselves. Computers are ridiculously complex, and you need a ton of knowledge to even start troubleshooting any but the most trivial problem.
Let's not try to make everyone believe that our machines are the issue, where the issue is clearly cultural before everything else.
Computers today are incredibly powerful, and because of that, operating systems and applications have become complex beasts themselves.
My first computer only had 4K and a text based interface. As an end user, I only needed to know a handful of commands. Most navigation was done through multiple choice text menus.
Even moving into the early 90s, when using System 6 and System 7 on Macs, the very notion of needing a second mouse button was considered a bad thing. If you needed that right button, your application design was too complex.
Fast forward a quarter of a century, and I can't live without a context menu, but I have 35 years of accumulated knowledge that lets me take this stuff for granted..
IMO, the amount of stuff I need to know today to get around a computer is an order of magnitude more than "back when".
Back in the old days, all you had to do was load and run stuff off discretely labeled physical media like a cassette or floppy. You only ran one program at a time. You didn't need to worry about network security, because the only network you could afford consisted of you putting your sneakers on and bringing a disk to another machine. Your computer was turned off with a switch. There was no need for a "shut down" command to fire. If you had a virus, it meant you caught a cold. Things were really simple back then.
That's way back in time. I was referring to the good old 90s, where the web took off with home computers that were already running stuff like Win95 and people were not complaining about being clueless on how to use them. Even older people (>50s) has no big issue to start using computers then, and I'd argue Win95 was a way harder system to learn for a newbie than Windows 7 or Windows 10. And on top of that recent operating systems are fairly stable and don't crash anymore when you plug a USB device or things like that - they have automatic driver installs, a bunch of hardware already supported by default, and I could go on and on. The situation is MUCH better for the end user nowadays than 20 years ago.
I remember this time completely different than you do.
From a hardware perpestive, once the iPad Air gets 4GB Ram, there is very little difference between it and the Chromebook.
The kernel doesn't matter - developers can and will target runtimes not operating systems. Today we're in a situation that would have been infeasible a few years ago: Microsoft producing apps for iOS. The strategy here is all about blocking competitive software from establishing itself against Office (the real cash-cow) and thus Microsoft services (a potential cash-cow) while the runtime is developed and rolled out across all systems.
What used to be vNext is now .NET Core and it is brilliant. It is largely open source[0], builds on open source tools and the runtime is small, fast and portable.
VS Code is an example of this new strategy: if Microsoft can make VS[1] and their developer toolchain (which has always been the best environment, imo) cross-platform then any app can be made cross-platform (this is working, at least in my case - I was never a .NET developer until .NET Core).
The advantage Windows will hold is DirectX and WPF - but for everyone else there is xwt[2] and coincidently (or not) Microsoft just bought Xamarin who wrote their cross-platform Studio product in xwt.
In the interim developers can use the existing cross-platform GUI toolkit: html. Bind to a local port and open the browser and point it to http://localhost:random_port (I just happen to install Sonarr[3] this morning which does this, it means you can distribute cross-platform binaries) or write a thin platform-specific frontend.
[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/code-vs.aspx
That's flat out incorrect.
I'll bet Adobe sell more Mac licenses.
I'll also be surprised if it doesn't suck compared to the desktop version.
You can just about justify running Photoshop and Illustrator on a remote server. But most of the world doesn't have the bandwidth for 4K video previewing. Or even for uploading native 4K from a camera.
I think it is reflective of a new generation whose first computing experience was with phones and tablets. The idea that nothing of importance lives on the device is a huge paradigm shift, and I don't know that old folks are comfortable making the shift yet (I'm not entirely there, and, despite being middle aged, I like to think I'm way out front on the technology curve). The mention of Chromebooks in schools lends some credence to this notion.
Anyway, I think it's great. A Chromebook is so much more empowering than an iPad or tablet (which is what I think this is actually mostly replacing for folks, rather than high end laptops). A keyboard opens up the door to really building and creating, USB ports allow expansion, and Chrome OS is hackable in ways tablets are not.
That may be because of who is buying them. They are making huge inroads to public schools (a former apple stronghold). The "Cloud Everything" bit solves a large "where's my data" problem that used to plague our kids WRT school work. No more taking the wrong thumbdrive to school problem.
Technology is very important to learning but there are so many useful and inexpensive ways to do this but this requires those in charge to look past the marketing power some companies wield
For instance, is a physical keyboard even necessary? Do you use FB? Apple, or Android phone? Contracts, or prepaid? Do you buy stuff from small websites? Or, is it just not worth the security risk? Does it bother you if a website demands a profile picture? Does the repairability of a electronic device matter? I'd appreciate any feedback.
I'm just curious. I'm not one of these rich guys trying to corner the next big trend. I'm pretty poor, but interested in tech., and would like to get a gauge on where it might be heading.
>> A keyboard opens up the door to really building and creating, USB ports allow expansion
>> and Chrome OS is hackable in ways tablets are not.
And a PC or Mac laptop is all of things, and so much more.
It's actually really easy to believe and frankly not particularly interesting. The cost of a chromebook is like 1/3 or something of that of a mac. I'd sure hope that unit volume was higher..
Other tasks have completely made the transition for many people. Listening to music; everybody under 30 streams it, and looks at me funny when I talk about "owning" an album. Email and messaging; no such thing as local email clients anymore, except for us stubborn old-timers, or people who have to use Outlook for work. Nobody I know, other than nerds with their own websites and servers, has an email address that isn't @gmail.com (a few @hotmail.com and maybe one or two Yahoos). I work on mail admin tools, and a webmail client and still use GMail exclusively for my personal mail. Photos are on their way off the local machine, but I think it's about 50/50 among my friends, as to whether they keep local copies or not.
Anyway, I've already said how I think it's different. It sounds like you disagree with me, though I'm not sure what the basis of your disagreement is; it seems to be that a regular laptop can do everything online like a Chromebook. Which I haven't said anything about; I'm speaking of who I think will be immediately comfortable with the Chromebook way of doing things, and I think it's people who've not been trained to think of a computer as a permanent storage device.
Personal anecdote - I like updating my resume at least once a year. A few years back I struggled to find the latest local copy of my Word resume. Frustrated, I found one that was a few years old, updated it with details for the intermediate years and proceeded to import it into Google docs. Now I don't have to look too hard to find it.
Depends on what you keep locally on the machine =) I've generally got a bunch of DVD rips, a few dozen games, my dev environments, documentation for whatever I'm working on (API references and such), a bunch of ebooks...
My important data is on my local machine, and my irreplaceable data is backed up to the cloud. It's a very different paradigm of computing, compared to the people whose laptops are "crippled" without Internet.
I take it as a given that my Chromebook will always be more secure than my Macs and Windows machines. Less likely to have invasive malware of all types.
I currently have a Toshiba Chromebook with a gorgeous screen and good battery life. It just works.
Here in New Hampshire I've seen many, especially among older people who are way too overwhelmed by PCs and Macs. Things like viruses, installing programs, updating the OS, "my hard drive is full? How do I fix that?", etc, there's just so much they have to learn that technical people and younger people take for granted as simple. The Chromebook reduces the bar to maintaining your own machine among low-digital-literacy people.
Many just want a "laptop" to get and send email, look at their grandkids on Facebook, complain on the local facebook page group about xyz, look up weather and news, and buy things online.
This group also does not understand why some laptops are $600 and others are $1,400 and yet they appear to run the same programs and visually look the same. I don't blame them. A few of my friends have said, "My mom/dad (aged 40-60) needed a new computer and I convinced them to get a Chromebook, now I don't have to answer all their technical questions anymore."
They are fantastic machines for the technically less-literate and frugal-minded.
In practice, this means that if I hit a three key chord, then I flip over to a regular xfce, and if I hit another three key chord I go back to ChromeOS.
I do all web-browsing in ChromeOS. I do all programming and textediting in xfce. Or rather in vim, using my standard vim setup. [I'm a mathematician, so I do somewhat minor programming and lots and lots of LaTeX writing].
I have a cheap 11" Acer C720 and I probably use it more than my Macbook Pro. I have command line only Ubuntu installed, and the result is a tab I can open to have a full linux shell, much like how you would use a macbook. For all intents and purposes, it's the same OS, but it's not.
A few things I particularly like are battery like (maybe 8 hours?), no fans, matte screen, and macbook like keyboard and trackpad. Also Chrome OS maps the F1/F2 keys to forward/backward keys in Chrome, which I use all the time surprisingly.
All in all, I would highly recommend a Chromebook. For development it's great. If you don't want to use Crouton, a linode server you can SSH into is just as good as a macbook really. Now that they will be able to run all Android apps, it's even more tempting.
I'm amused by this explanation, because I grew up doing chroot before virtualization took off and obviously before Docker.
Feeling old.
I think you must be mistaken on this. I own a C720, and there is a fan in it.
You can see it in the upper left of this picture:
https://www.chromium.org/_/rsrc/1381990807648/chromium-os/de...
Well, this assumes one particular type of development! I would not choose a Chromebook to develop, say, Chrome!
I tried Crouton a few years ago, wanting to run xbmc. Audio didn't work, because it required a newer version of the Linux kernel. It turns out you can't just install a stock Linux kernel: you have to use a patched device-specific kernel that Google provides, and for my device, the Google-provided kernel was too old. Perhaps I could have built some frankenkernel, but instead I gave up and got a real Linux box.
I would not try to use Crouton again for a general Linux box, because you become dependent on Google for updating core software.
My "special needs" was running popular and well known Linux software. Many people in this thread have said that running Crouton on a Chromebook is just like having Ubuntu or Debian. But this is not so:
1. Google does not reliably update core software
2. It's harder to get help when things go wrong, because the system is sufficiently different from an ordinary Linux box
For those reasons, if you want to run Linux software, it's better to use a familiar Linux distribution, and not ChromeOS.
Only because upstreaming is so slow. Those patches end up on the relevant mailing lists and eventually get merged.
I tried using a Class 10 MicroSD card to hold an Ember-CLI project, and running commands on it was intolerably slow.
Rich vs. thin client is a pendulum that seems to swing about every 10-20 years.
In the mid-'70s, a computer was a big box by IBM or DEC with a number of thin terminals attached. These had enough power to display a screenful of interactive information without having to talk to the server constantly (sort of like an early version of HTML forms).
Then PCs happened, and suddenly you could have your very own device with a slice of the power of that DEC. The client was suddenly so rich but widely available connectivity so slow -- 300-1200 bps modems -- that most people never connected to a server (except for special national networks like France's Minitel).
By the mid-'90s, thin was in again. Sun and Oracle defined a "Network Computer" spec. Apple was planning to build devices for it, but then Jobs had better ideas and the NC never really took off.
So we got ever richer clients in even more personal form factors. The iPhone became the ultimate rich client: in the App Store model, each online service provider is expected to build a native binary and deliver it through Apple. Microsoft has been plotting along similar lines with the Universal Windows platform.
At the same time Google has been trying to push the pendulum back to the thin end. With the new "Instant Apps" model [1], even Android is being turned into a web-like platform of app fragments delivered on the fly. Will be interesting to see how far they can take this -- will the Android runtime be part of Chrome eventually?
[1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-insta...
I think it's a hill that a lot of people and companies have been pushing computing tech up for many years...now we've reached the top, and we're rolling down the other side. Getting to the top required getting mobile networks "fast enough", systems small enough (because what's the point of being mobile if your system is big and heavy...might as well leave it plugged in at home or at the office), and the web (or something like it) advanced enough to be the platform on which these network apps are built.
If it were a pendulum, we'd see it swing back in 10-20 years. I can't think of any scenario in which that'll happen, even as small/personal devices get more powerful.
Note: I don't know if our destination is a good one. But, momentum and gravity (and hundred billion dollar companies) are definitely pushing us in a pretty clear direction.
Transport signals have gone from 2.5G to 10G to 40G to 100G to 200G per wave, and from 8 waves to 16 waves to 40 waves to 96 waves to 100+ waves per fiber.
The bottleneck has existed for a decade at least, and is invested in to keep pushing it out at the same time all this other stuff is happening.
Effectively Chromebooks are the new "EEE PC"/netbook which were also very popular with children and teens as they were chip as dirt which meant that they were often bought as a gift or when a child needed a 2nd computer to take with them.
So when you have devices that cost 199 it's not that surprising that they outsell devices that cost 899 and upwards.
If the "premium" chromebooks outsold MBP's/MB's it would be as much as a surprise to me as why would anyone want to put a Core i7/i5 CPU and upto 16GB's of RAM in a chromebook in the first place.
HN users don't see Chromebooks because HN users are a very special subset - highly educated and well paid which works in development and IT at large.
If you look at children and low wage blue collar workers you'll see many more of them those are the people that buy what one would not even consider a budget laptop but an entry one.
Those are also the people for whom Google and Facebook are defacto the internet, I've recently met people that didn't knew "Office" even existed outside of Google Docs.
If you are high school student that only wants to get access to Facebook and maybe be able to write a small paper you don't need more than a Chromebook. If you are a truck driver or a security guard that wants to be able to read email or watch YouTube you don't need more than a Chromebook. And for those people a 150-250$ device makes all the sense in the world.
College students would probably still be able to use a Chromebook for 99% of their tasks, but since Apple has a student discount it's chic Apple most likely will still continue to rule the College class.
I mean really, 99% of the time all you need is a web browser and a connection to remote into the machine that's doing the real lifting for you.
My favourite part is the disposability. If it gets trashed or stolen, all I have to do is sign in to a new chromebook and generate new keys to be back up and running.
The major difference between a Ubuntu and a ChromeOS install is that one of them has a lot of marketing, the other doesn’t.
That’s the largest difference.
And he's not a first time user of computers either. He grew up with an Atari 400 (yup, he was a teenager during the Golden Age of home computers).
[1] That is, he makes all his income from his writing. https://seanhoade.wordpress.com/
Edit: added a bit of history. And a link in case anyone is interested in his books.
After listening to her describe the conditions and her needs, I suggested a few changes: transition to lower wattage mobile equipment, integrate redundant, portable power, and more effective use of solar. This boiled down to Chromebooks, portable APs, and certain smartphones, marine and other LA batteries, and lots of lithium USB power packs.
In return, she shipped me her old Mac hardware, which I opened up and emptied of all dust, sand, and scorpions before diagnosing most as damaged from overheating. It was awful how poorly those glossy screens held up to environmental abrasion, and the one unit that survived, the smell still hasn't left completely.
The Chromebooks (K1 based), which held charge on testing for 8-10 hours under heavy use, are light yet durable, have no moving internal (or servicable) parts, are or can be sealed against the environment, and are passively cooled. They also run the full Docs suite offline, take excellent dictation for transcription, can remote into her other computers, and they look nice. The model was just under $300 and had a 1080 screen, better than decent speakers, and most importantly, it plays x264 video so she can catch up on her shows.
My only concerns were for the lack of non-removable batteries and the very narrow cylindrical DC plugs the chargers use, but battery diagnostics have been great, and since they never all have to be charged at the same time, about half of the chargers can break (though none have, yet) and not cause any issue.
I don't know how most people on HN live, if they have good electricity, air conditioning or potable running water, whether they own vehicles that they can drive to pick up and haul perishable groceries around in, or if they can cheaply or quickly replace equipment that dies sooner than it should, warranty or no, within their countries. But for anyone who doesn't have all of those things, I'd say Chromebooks would be an exceedingly appropriate choice.
So to answer another way, wherever the internet is good or bad, so is the dust. That's why these systems had to be field-capable.
e: I should clarify that I meant wired internet. The smartphones are for providing cellular internet, which she gets more places than not. Wired internet is less generally available to her far outside of the cities. She's not particularly interested in technology, so she doesn't use smartphones as USB modems for her portable network for their Chromebooks, opting to transfer documents to the phones to upload or email. If I understood right, she waits until they're back to transfer any other contents to their office computers.
Even in Africa, not having those and having good, stable and cheap internet is a really weird case.
It's true that it is weird from the Western perspective, but it's actually true.
I work in a building with a company who build Flow-batteries. Their biggest markets are in South America and Africa where the mobile networks are often more reliable than the electricity networks because they run batter backups on their towers.
Communications are often seen as more important than anything else. If you have access to a phone you can find out where to get clean water.
See for example More Africans have cellphones than have electricity or piped water: http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2014/11/19/more-africans-...
I wrote at more length about it in yesterday's ChromeOS post[0]. I don't think it's the year of the linux desktop anymore than Android is the year of the linux phone. Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer.
I find the book itself more interesting. Netbooks were crap for a long time, but things have gotten cheaper and I enjoy the form factor. Writing this from an Acer C720 running GalliumOS as we speak, but I'm in the super minority of Chromebook users. Read the Amazon reviews once of a Chromebook and you'll see what they find irritating or glorious. Hint: It's not the lack of a good IDE or inability to install gvim. Also, anyone that says Chromebook sales are great because their such an 'open hardware ecosystem' is fooling themselves [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11735326 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11735762
Perhaps Stallman has a point when asking people to talk about Linux as GNU/Linux.
Especially Google’s actions have been quite literally towards unlawful-evil.
I don't necessarily think that an operating system being locked down is equivalent to anti-consumer. For the vast majority of consumers, I think that opening up the full complexity of linux would just be too much hassle and not worth the gains.
I'm all for standard accounts that have strict privilege boundaries, but with ChromeOS, the consumer can't even decide to be a true administrator. No one's saying everyone needs to be a sysadmin, but a user shouldn't have to enable Developer Mode and deal with usability dark patterns if they want to.
Mozilla used to let the consumer decide, but even they require you to run a separate build in order to install software without their blessing: User freedom is one of their core principles. If developer mode features and privacy opt-outs silently disappear from an entrenched ChromeOS, most wouldn't blink.
Motivations school districts might have for switching: (1) Cheaper, (2) Keyboards are nice for typing, (3), More resilient over time due to easy software updates, and (4) Easier to debug (similar to prior point; nothing is stored locally, so a 3 minute re-image fixes most software problems)
In addition, folks in that thread think that tablets are generally the worst of both worlds as compared to laptops and phones (phablets?), whereas Chromebook are everything that tablets should be.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/4k234g/chromebooks...
In such an informal setting, the quality and worth of the source are up to the consumer; particularly when it is such a simple investigation. Do you trust or distrust the source? That belief guides your consumption of the poster's opinion.
More than nice, they're generally a purchasing requirement for taking standardized tests
So what happened? It's simple:
* Everything runs inside Linux containers with reasonably secure seccomp profiles.
* SecureBoot provides some reliability against attacks. (I do not use Cruton or feel the need for it despite doing development)
* It's inexpensive. Arguably, buying my machine was free when considering the credits for Google drive, Google Play, and Gogo-inflight wifi.
* It does everything I need, with the caveat that "everything it doesn't do" is something I can do on a server or VM running in the cloud (or a closet).
Honestly, I see the Chromebook as a secure thin-client. That's good because I don't think it could be much fatter and secure. I certainly don't trust running anything on a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop.
Today, I'd buy (and probably will buy) the HP Chromebook 13. It starts at $499 but includes a QHD+ panel ("Retina") and an "Intel Core m" CPU (or higher). Only one model of the range is available right now, but options will include Pentium, m3, m5, m7 CPUs and up to 16GB of RAM. It is thinner, lighter, and cheaper than the Macbook Air.
So far my experience with that is trying to get an Active Directory server to sync with Google Apps for Education, for which they provide this tool:
https://support.google.com/a/answer/6027781?hl=en
It's beyond buggy, it's plain broken. It clearly hasn't been touched in years. I'm going to have to write the glue code myself.
If you really need to sync passwords, they have have GAPS. https://support.google.com/a/answer/2611859?hl=en
I've found our android tablets to be more crashy offline as apps that can't get an internet connection go braindead, blank, or just kick you out. Based on my Android experience I've been reluctant to get a chromebook even though I know they are popular in schools.
As a parent I'm also concerned about the privacy aspects. I believe schools get a special Chromebook that cuts back on the tracking, does this hold true for their retail models?
But if you are a bit confident in your Linux skills, then I would recommend looking into Crouton [1], which allows you to easily access a fully functional Linux. I'm not sure what you're after, but this is what I use, and it satisfies all my needs. [I mean, it's just a Linux laptop, but that's what I need].
Interesting use case. How about a solid refurbished laptop (or rooted Chromebook) with a set of Debian stable DVDs (you can install thousands of packages offline) and a local install of Wikipedia[1] and a dump of Project Gutenberg[2]?
Save that couple of kilobauds for email.
[1] http://xowa.org/home/wiki/App/Import/English_Wikipedia.html#...
[2] http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/12311/how-to-down...
I saw that the Chromebooks were really popular and figure it might replace one or two of our laptops that are slowly dissolving in the salty air. But working offline for months at time is essential. This old battle axe of a Macbook Pro will have to keep on trucking. I've already lost the SD-card slot and glass is cracked (dropped from a motorbike)
Not used a Chromebook, but I assume whatever works in offline mode in Chrome (e.g. Google Docs and Amazon Kindle) works in a Chromebook.
> As a parent I'm also concerned about the privacy aspects. I believe schools get a special Chromebook that cuts back on the tracking, does this hold true for their retail models?
I don't think Chromebooks have any additional tracking beyond what Chrome has.
I gave it to my dad, who just loves it! He uses it for his email, browsing, document editing, photos, and videos.
If that's all you do, then Chromebook is the system for you.
I have crouton on it and this comment was typed in firefox on crouton. Whenever I need to, I switch to Chrome OS to use Chrome. I had problem with getting audio to work in the beginning but to be fair that was around the same time I really didn't know how to switch between Crouton and Chrome OS.
It would do with more storage but I have a 32gig sd card in it which gives me a little more mileage than depending only on the internal storage.
Honestly the only REAL work I do on it is learning Javascript even though I got it specifically to learn PHP but things seem to require a lot of tweaking when installing PHP and even setting up ur webserver that I gave up and decided to learn Javascript, which only requires a browser. But I'm sure that's my problem with Linux and not Chromebook.
I have never had an "Ultrabook" before so I really enjoy the sleek nature of this and I don't think I'm going to ever buy any laptop bigger than this ever and the all day battery life makes it awesome.
Apart from the usage above, everything else is like your dad's though. Maybe crouton may have jx gotten better since your experience
Thursday, I got the "your backup can't be verified" message, meaning that Apple threw away my backups. This is Apple product backing up to Apple product. I tried fixing it with fsck_hfs but it wasn't finished when I went to bed.
Today, I woke up and my MacBook Air is doing a nice loop where it lets me log in, then reboots. It's done that 10 times. I've tried resetting the PRAM, going single-user, logging in as a different user and finally re-installing the OS. Still doing it.
My wife and I have MacBook Airs and there's a shared Mac Mini in the family room. We got it mostly because the older kids needed Microsoft Office. It's attached to a 22" screen but is rarely used. The schools are using Google Docs and rarely print anything out.
My 3 kids love their Chromebooks. They use them for Youtube and reading fan fiction and things like that.
I'm typing this on a 2013 Chromebook Pixel which I bought off someone on Craigslist because I was curious to see what the build quality was like. My MacBook Air has been sucking wind with 4GB of memory and I've been waiting to see what the new MacBooks look like.
I take a lot of photos and I find that the Chromebook doesn't handle looking at 700 photos very well. But for 95% of what I do, the Pixel is better than the MBA. It's got bad battery life but then my MBA does, too. I had it hooked up to an external screen because I wanted more resolution and using the charger too much wrecked the battery.
Almost everything I want to do is shared online. I want my kids (and parents of other players/students) to have access to photos. I bought a family version of ARQ (highly recommended) because I wanted to do local data, physical off-site (at my mom's every couple of months), Airport Capsule and stored on Amazon's servers.
Now I'm trying to figure out how to re-invent things where I just use a Chromebook. Maybe I just use the Mac Mini for copying photos off SD cards to Flickr and onto a hard drive.
Anyway, point is that I don't think my kids will ever be very interested in spending their own money on a Mac even though they love their iPhones.
Seriously, Apple needs to rethink Airport Capsule. Either make everything iCloud Backup, or make Airport Capsule actually safe and consumable.
I also fear that between this and iOS, we are starting to see a divide between production and consumption devices more than ever. I don't consider that a good trend.
I likely will have to buy some of the kid's games again for Android but they have outgrown a lot and as they grow older anyway. Having a device with a keyboard that can run minecraft pe, or access the web or be used for school work, or run a linux chroot seems like a huge leap forward over iPads.
My Chromebook was surprisingly hackable and getting a shell is pretty trivial. You can easily live in a chroot on a model with better hardware. Sometimes selling a tiny bit of freedom or privacy for trivial entertainments or day to day practicality is a reasonable tradeoff.
They work better as a secondary device for power users but I suspect the number of people who can use them as a primary device isn't negligible and will increase as the platform matures.
I have mostly retired my Chromebook for a higher spec laptop running a full linux desktop. But I can see a lot of potential for Chromebooks and with some nicer models coming along with access to the Android store I can see them replacing both laptops and tablets for family.
They are secure, practical and low maintenance and I am not at all surprised that they have done well in education and I expect higher specced ones have a very good chance in enterprise.
Not a problem for me, and it's pretty hard for me to develop when my internet connection sucks anyways (no modules, no documentation, no cloud access, etc.).
> or you need hardware access
Yes, this is the primary valid reason I see.
> you're doing anything that requires a low latency
Low latency from what? My cloud machines have super low latency to each other and to the net.
> you want to run the software locally for any reason
Running it in my cloud machine is locally, to me. The only reason it would need to be truly local if you're doing something regarding hardware / peripherals / etc., as you mentioned.
Still, it seems strange that a web developer would prefer to develop on an OS that only supports one web browser!
The Chromebook Pixel running Fedora is a lovely development platform.
Whether you're running ChromeOS, or Crouton, or GalliumOs, chromebooks (even cheap ones) are great dev machines.
I think it was an insanely crappy decision for Steve Jobs to hand the controls of Apple to a logistics expert.
Perhaps it doesn't match purpose-built gaming notebooks, and definitely not desktops, but they usually are the first to have a new Intel processor, have newish graphics hardware, pioneered mainstream PCIe storage and high-resolution displays...You might pay a lot for what you get, but there's no doubt it's good hardware.
I generally like my MacBook Pro, but I'm less convinced it's superior to PC hardware as it used to be. It feels like Apple has lost interest in the Mac, and PC vendors are selling comparable hardware for about half the price.
The Macbook I worry about more.
All our infrastructure runs through google, the machines are really affordable for a small non-profit, and given that many of our volunteers and the people we serve are not very technologically literate they are far easier to manage and help people do what they need to do.
As an individual I don't know that I'd ever buy a chromebook- I have the advantage of being able to afford a regular laptop and I would rather throw money at a laptop than deal with the inconveniences of areas where web everything just doesn't work, but I can see them continuing to gain traction in institutional settings like nonprofits, schools, and even workplaces for people who don't need access to a lot of applications or local processing power.
I was going to get a dell xps 13 when that power saving bug was unveiled so I ended up getting a toshiba chromebook 2 and a 256gb SSD for <600$
Now I'm running native linux via seabios and loving it. I hate the spacebar screen on startup but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay 500$ to get rid of it.
So while a lot of people think it's a PC that does less, I think it is more a tablet that does more.
My 2008 Macbook died in March, that triggered me to mostly use my 2013 Pixel for dev. Although I do have an 27 iMac at home.
My dev is mostly Web Dev + GCP and moving to Firebase (canonically all front end dev). Hence even though I have Ubuntu via Crouton, I rarely need a local Fuse file system. For node work and CLI work I spin up a GCP VM. The VM costs about $13 per month, but I turn the VM off and pay pennies for storage.
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/fileSystemProvider
With coreboot enabling installation of Linux on the Pixel for developers (And stock ChromeOS for regular users, of course), there is no reason to prefer MBP over the Pixel.
1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook#Sales_and_marketing
> ChromeOS itself is free to license for vendors
Are users tracked any more on a Chromebook than a) a MacBook Air running Chrome b) a MacBook Air running Safari?
There's not really any way to know based on the current information I have access to.
Can you use a Chromebook without being logged in to a Google account? Can you block ads, trackers, and other creepy JavaScript on a Chromebook? Even the ones from Google?
You can run all Chrome extensions, including µblock , adblock , privacy badger, ...
That's a good point. You log in to the OS via a Google account. You can log out of that account from Chrome-the-browser, though. (In fact it looks like I'm currently only logged in to my employer's Google Apps account, and nobody's told https://accounts.google.com about my Chromebook account.) And I log into my Chromebook with a dedicated Google account, but I realize that not everyone will.
However, you can install Privacy Badger or anything else that you could install on other Chrome platforms, and it should effectively block Google's cookies from reaching other domains. There's probably some JS involved in running the browser itself that's shipped on the device, but if you want to avoid all google.com-delivered JS, you should be able to do that. (I believe this is no different from Chrome on the Mac.)
I bought it because I was spending most of my time in ssh/emacs and I wouldn't be too worried about losing a Chromebook. Three years later the joke's on me.
As others have noted, crouton is super and updates are seamless. I use it locally way more than I'd anticipated. IMO the standout feature is the keyboard.
Also, AppleCare costs more than a Chromebook.
who cares
"Why the hell don't you release a retina macbook air? (A toy 'macbook' does not count.)
I am running IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise (in a Windows 10 Fusion VM) without any issues.
The lightweight portability and 12" retina screen are amazing.