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Comment by collinf | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally speaking, I have a couple friends in medical school right now and they do everything on their iPad + keyboard. My mom has used an iPad as her primary computer for the past 5 years. For a lot of people who primarily interact with their computer using PDF's, slideshows, a little email and video, I think that it is a totally respectable replacement.

I would be curious to see what percent of the market is people that want their computer to be doing things powerful enough to justify a computer more powerful than an iPad pro is.

Disclaimer: Obviously a $300 chromebook destroys an iPad in price but you know so do a lot of Android phones and people still pay the premium for iPhones because they are sexy[1].

[1]https://www.recode.net/2017/9/12/16290910/apple-event-iphone...

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I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the future of “personal” computing on non-phone devices (eg next 10-20 years) ends up looking like the Microsoft era, but with ChromeOS laptops in place of Windows, iPad/future large format iOS devices in the position of the Mac. I see a huge generation of kids in the US quite literally growing up with Chromebooks, it will be interesting to see if they keep using the platform as adults. The ease of switching device with ChromeOS is pretty remarkable really, the truest realisation of “the network is the computer” we’ve seen.

It’s pretty clear Apple don’t care hugely about losing marketshare in education as their recent still pretty expensive edu focused “cheap iPad” shows. They will enjoy what they always did, quality computing products for a small marketshare who are happy to pay high margins for it, leaving the other PC manufacturers to bloody battle over minuscule margins and hard to differentiate product.

Google needs to make an extra effort for that to actually happen.

ChromeOS is barely noticeable outside US.

I see a huge generation of kids in the US quite literally growing up with Chromebooks, it will be interesting to see if they keep using the platform as adults

But they're just using the Chromebooks to access Google Docs and Google Classroom for school work. The cloud ecosystem is what will matter more than the browser used to get there. Kids care even less about the hardware it's running on.

Apple is too far behind now on all of this.

Except that iOS blows away ChromeOS and Google’s half assed approach refusing to have a competent approach to tablets...so maybe it’s a bit more than whatever that unnecessarily disclaimer is saying.

Depends. I think a Chromebook is ergonomically a better choice–the keyboard, while worse in quality, gets points just because it has travel can actually function on my lap. Plus you can slap Linux on it and get a nice lightweight machine that can actually do quite a bit. But for most people I think an iPad is a better choice, and personally I feel the same for myself–anything really advanced is better off on my Mac rather than on a crummy 11" (or really nice 10.5") screen.

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