Comment by ythn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ythn | Hacker News Reader

This seems like common sense.

I bought a Macbook Pro in 2010. Eventually I realized I only used my laptop for internet-related tasks, mainly when I was traveling or in my living room (instead of my office). After my MBP's battery degraded and I had to replace the hard drive cable I threw in the towel and bought a Chromebook for less than 1/10 the cost of the MBP. Not only has the Chromebook lasted longer (more years) than the MBP, I've never had a single maintenance issue with it, and it serves my needs just as well as the MBP, if not better.

So the question is, why pay 10x the price for power and features you will barely even use or notice? I could buy a stack of 10 Chromebooks for the price of 1 MBP, which, at the current rate, would last me 50 years. Same goes for smartphones. I can buy a stack of five Nokia 6 phones for the price of 1 iPhone. This is a no brainer for financially sensitive people.

Well, like all Google products, you’re paying with your privacy instead of money. I guess privacy is only for people who aren’t “financially sensitive” now.

Well, before my Android phone I owned a Nokia Windows Phone which was also 1/10th the price of an iPhone. Not sure how that point of data fits into your narrative...

Please explain how Chromebooks violate your privacy, thanks!

Any product made by google has the goal of harvesting data. Whether you see that as an invasion of your privacy is a matter of personal interpretation.

Android is a privacy sink. The second you log in, you've literally turned on the data tap for Google to snarf up everything you've got. Everything is tracked, profiles created, data sold, everything. Apple does not do this, and if they do, I cannot detect it.

These are all under powered computers, nothing to do with being google product installed on them(you can just wipe the OS if you want). In India, you can buy higher spec windows computers cheaper than chromebooks.

It sounds like for your use case the chrome book is a better option. For my use case (creative professional doing lots of video editing) the mbp is the better option. One client project pays the cost of the MacBook and then some. My point is, everyone has different use cases. To you, it’s a ripoff. To me, it’s indispensable. So to answer your question of why anyone would pay for a mbp, it’s because it fits their use case.

Yeah, and my point was that your use case is the minority compared to the average user, and when you scale up my use case to billions of people, like the article says, it's not a viable.

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