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Comment by thehappypm | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know how Chromebooks generally are doing? I use one at work and I’ve been surprised by how effective it has been, I really don’t feel a huge loss between it and a Mac because my company just does everything in the browser. For my next personal laptop I may stick with a Mac but would certainly choose a Chromebook over a Windows PC because it’s just a better user experience IMO

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Why limit yourself to a Chromebook? Macs and Windows PCs have a browser plus everything else. If all you want to do is browse the web a tablet is a better choice.

Macs are undoubtedly better, but have two main drawbacks: cost and boot time. ChromeOS wakes up in seconds. My Mac takes a while.

Windows is just so awful I don’t know where to start haha

Why would you boot your Mac all the time? That’s what sleep is for.

I tend to power down when I’m not using it, if I don’t I feel like I always have too many windows and tabs open after a while.

My piece of advice. Just don't. Keep in sleeping. Just close the lid and forget about it. It's a very good experience.

What kind of Mac do you have? My “power down” habit was learned from my PC days, where my laptop would slowly burn down battery on sleep/hibernate, combined with the slow degradation in performance from extended sessions.

I get it! I haven't used Macs much, mostly windows and linux, suspend/resume is really funky on windows for me. Linux was pretty much instantaneous when resuming on my ThinkPad.

I also didn't lose much battery life, probably 5% overnight-midday.

That's not what most people do and not how it's supposed to be used, so you are arguing a strawman. My MBA M1 is the best laptop I have ever used in 30+ years. The battery life alone is outstanding and it does wake up effectively instantly. I can go months between rebooting.

ADD: as for cost, in my experience, my MacBooks tend to live for MUCH longer than my winbooks. My wife's MacBook Pro is over 8 years old. Personally I dread switching notebooks (moving data, adding customization, etc) and would happily pay double for something that will last me twice as long or longer.

Strawman? Really? I’m just talking about my own experience of how I use my own computer.

That’s fine but maybe don’t complain about how booting takes time then.

Nah, I will

> would happily pay double for something that will last me twice as long or longer.

I'm still delivering software and making money from my Toshiba 1805. I'm not sure exactly how old it is though, I got it secondhand maybe 19-20 years ago.

Chromebooks have been really awful in my experience. Most of them are underpowered bricks that can barely run Linux apps. Too much lock-in, limitations and spyware on it to be good for programming.

I bought one and was surprised at how bad everything was. The time it takes for Linux VM to boot and apps to start was really off putting. I went ahead and put ZorinOS on it, I don't have much storage to dual boot with the stock eMMC I can't upgrade, but at least the laptop is way more capable and enjoyable to use. Still bad performance but much better than ChromeOS.

If you’re trying to run apps at all, youre probably gonna have a bad time with a Chromebook. If youre mostly doing light stuff like email and video chatting it has been surprisingly effective for me.

Yeah I get that, you can probably watch YouTube and attend online meetings but I'm always kinda skeptical of people recommending it as a productivity device or a laptop that can be used for programming.

The RAM alone isn't enough to run production grade servers as it would either take an eternity to run or just crash with an out of memory error. Running VSCode and a browser is more than enough to occupy most of the RAM on mine.

I don’t write much code, but there are engineers who do, and they do some kind of remote server based development which works with the Chromebook

Chromebooks basically own the K-12 education in the US since schools get them as part of a subscription to Google Classroom, they're also cheap and easily managed. I think Google hopes that it'll result in those kids buying Chromebooks as teens and adults, but they're not great gaming devices.

Personally we have one (HP x360) in the kitchen as a recipe/youtube computer, and it's perfect. Half the cost of an iPad with multi-user support and a real keyboard.

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