Chromebook Plus | Hacker News Reader

Chromebook Plus

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201 pointsmikece306 comments

Eight new laptops from Acer, ASUS, HP and Lenovo.

I feel like pulled off right, this "shared ecosystem" approach across manufacturers can be very strong, and from a competition perspective is probably pretty healthy. That said, the "everything under one roof" pull of the Apple world is pretty strong.

I've been pretty happy with my Google hardware so far (Nexus and then Pixel phones, Nest minis, pixel buds), but now that I'm interested in a smart watch, I'm running into a bit of a wall. I want to want a Pixel watch, but it sounds like the integration with the Pixel phone is not all that great, and for a lot of fitness tracking you also need a separate FitBit account, and have to use a separate FitBit app (!) and it doesn't integrate super well with all my existing data in Google's own Google Fit app that I've got.

I know it's not fair to compare these ~$400 laptops with Apple's laptops, but it just seems like Apple is better positioned to pull off seamless integration between laptops, phones, watches, earbuds, etc, when they're not working at cross purposes with a dozen other manufacturers.

Then again, some people probably actively don't want all this integration? Maybe just a simple, standalone, cheap laptop is ideal for them, and that's who this is targeting.

>pulled off right, this "shared ecosystem" approach across manufacturers can be very strong, and from a competition perspective is probably pretty healthy.

I wish the Steam Machines didn't fail, they were pretty much this https://web.archive.org/web/20160303080731/https://store.ste...

One can say the Steam Deck is a better successor but I think mostly because of Proton itself became mature through the years (compared to 2016)

There is Steam for ChromeOS in the Beta channel right now. It's working surprisingly well, running inside a VM with virgl acceleration.

I could imagine a gaming Chromebox or Chromebook with dedicated graphics in the future.

What could be a wonderful asset would be a streaming service for games. Google would just have to make a credible, consistent commitment to such a service, commit to it through its initial wilderness period and not shut it down on a reflex, so customers would have the confidence that their time learning the platform wouldn't be wasted.

Then, with something like this launch event for 2x faster Chromebooks, it could emerge as a mature offering whose moment as come. All it would take is discipline not to instantly give up and a willingness to have a vision extending beyond quarter-at-a-time release cycles.

This is painful to read. Too soon.

My bold prediction is that as consoles become more and more architecturally similar to home computers and MS & Sony continue to port more titles to PC, we will eventually see a unification of sorts where games are by default available on PC, with consoles serving as essentially a consistent and well-tested PC configuration for people who don't want to futz around with PC building. That's the role Steam Machines were supposed to play. They were a little too early IMO but the concept seems solid.

Game companies don't just want consistent and well-tested, they often want to also prevent user tampering. Consoles + iPhone security have long put extra effort into that, and streaming is looking like a viable replacement. Not a good solution for people extremely into video games, but they've got gaming PCs anyway.

And they want walled garden, subscription fee for network access, etc.

Yeah now anti-cheat (and lack of moddability) is the most significant difference for PC vs console. Steam Deck is interesting that they want to be a console like experience but it's flexible unlike traditional consoles.

I also love Apple's OS and first-party apps' seamless integration. However, Google has a better story with cloud apps in gsuite. My Mac is overkill hardware for running a browser, but I like the build quality.

> However, Google has a better story with cloud apps in gsuite.

Except that they just set a death date for my go to whiteboarding app.

It was great to be able to have a dead simple paintbrush level drawing app that was shared in the browser, and I could sketch out on my tablet without dealing with drawing "boxes" and text labels to get an idea across.

I have the pixel watch and I don't use the Fitbit stuff. Google fit is now first class on it, and it is a super well thought out and polished implementation. I'm really pleased with it

> Laptop shopping is harder than it should be. You can easily get lost in a sea of numbers and technical specs,

> We’re launching eight new laptops

This reads like satire.

You can get a 16" 2.5K 120hz 12th-gen i3 Chromebook from 2022 for $430[1].

Are any of these "Chromebook Plus" models better? I don't think so.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Lenovo-Ideapad-5i-Gaming-Chromebo...

That's because this one is a Chromebook Plus.

> In addition to new Chromebook Plus devices, some existing Chromebooks will qualify for an OS update to include the enhanced features found on Chromebook Plus devices in the coming weeks.

> See here for details on eligible devices.[1]

[1] https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/14128000?visit_...

Fair enough. Still a bit sneaky with the marketing, but that's par for the course.

I'm just over here wishing the "enhanced features" included coreboot support...

It does. This is a Alder Lake device so it's either a Brya or Nissa mainboard. Sourcecode is here[1].

[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/third_party/cor...

I stand corrected!

Is there a more discoverable way to find this info?

AFAIK there are only a few Chromebooks that don't run coreboot. You can check this[1] list for the board codenames and correlate that with the repository.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...

thanks. I'm glad the framework chromebook is listed.

Do you know of all Chromebooks have cellular modems? It seems like it would be a basic requirement but the article doesn't mention anything.

Why would it be a basic requirement? Cellular modems in laptop are an incredibly niche feature. They're only included in a handful of top-end business laptops and (in my experience) nobody even uses them when present.

Further to actually use cellular modems you likely need to pay an additional fee every month to a cellphone carrier.

That requirement probably makes the already tiny subset of people who could use a cellular modem even smaller.

There is a fee, but typically it’s a data-only plan and isn’t super expensive. I’m on T-Mobile and it’s $20 for unlimited data. You can pay even less for limited data.

wouldn't it be easier / cheaper to just tether?

Cheaper, probably. Not easier though.

After thinking about it a bit more, Chromebooks biggest users seem to be schools and they don’t want 5G modems for everybody. I would guess they would want some for kids who don’t have decent home internet. It makes sense for the default to be Wi-Fi only.

Clicking the wifi hotspot icon and connecting to a wifi network is not only significantly easier than setting up a billing account and paying $100 for a data-only cellular modem plus $20/month for a bare-bones data plan, it's worked flawlessly on at leat the last 4 phones I've owned when it was an android built-in feature.

$20/month is absolutely expensive if your laptop is hardly ever going to leave your home wi-fi (like most laptops)

Right! Is there a term for this phenomenon where people think their incredibly niche requirement should be ubiquitous and are astonished that it isn't?

It’s weird though why it’s so niche, because it’s incredibly useful.

I wonder how many laptops have cellular options right now. From a cursory look they're awfully niche (mostly business BTO models).

My best guess would be that the including the cellular chip and paying whoever (Qualcomm ?) holds the licensing fees, doing the qualification etc. is just that prohibitive.

PS：Qualcomm's fees based on the total product price sure won't help: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-qualcomm-licensing-idUSKB...

Qualcomm’s horrible licensing fees are cancerous. It’s the only reason I can imagine why Apple especially doesn’t do this for Macs the way they do for iPads.

> when they're not working at cross purposes with a dozen other manufacturers.

Manufacturers of Chromebooks mostly only deal with the outer shell and branding of the device.

The computing hardware is controlled by Google, who set strict guidelines for compatibility. The ChromeOS software is of course completely controlled by Google. This announcement sounds like it's basically creating a new brand around an even more restrictive set of higher-performance hardware requirements.

"I've been pretty happy with my Google hardware so far".

I have a pixel phone. The hardware is impressive. The software is total junk. Everything is designed for to make you into an obsessive-compulsive phone junky. How many stupid alerts and notifications do I need per second. How many ads must I watch? I went back to an iphone despite feeling like the pixel was actually a really good piece of hardware. And an iPhone is not that much better any more.

    Everything is designed for to make you 
    into an obsessive-compulsive phone junky. 
    [...] And an iPhone is not that much better 
    any more.

Regardless of OS, this seems like it's almost entirely down to the apps you use and the notification settings you pick. No? I rarely use Android so I may just be unfamiliar.

The defaults are different. I was surprised to find that Android apps didn't have to ask to send notifications, rather you had to turn them off, but this was changed in Android 13 near the end of 2022.

I switched to an iPhone about a year ago, and got annoyed at the pushy things iOS was doing that Android wasn't. So I switched back to Android recently, only to find that many of the annoying iOS things had now been adopted by Google. Great, thanks. I'll stick with Android for the near future though, as with a custom rooted ROM I can at least remove a lot of 'unremovable' stuff, even if I now have to play annoying cat and mouse games with apps trying to detect my rooted device and disable themselves.

I'm honestly confused by this comment. I use a Pixel phone and the reason I prefer it over my previous Samsung experiences is the UI is toned back and doesn't hit you with distractions.

Does pixel have forced updates? Samsung phones do.

The best thing about Google phones is they're ironically the easiest devices to de-Google. Install GrapheneOS on it.

The generic solutions are cheaper and more flexible, while the special all-included one is more user-friendly and can be better-optimized. It's similar with other products.

Beware? On Amazon, Samsung sellers are advertising their chromebooks as “plus”.

> for a lot of fitness tracking you also need a separate FitBit acCount, and have to use a separate FitBit app

not for long. you will soon be required to migrate to Google by 2025. new Fitbit comes with controls for YouTube Music and none else. so the integrations are coming, which I absolutely love.

don't let Nadella hear you say you're moving from the Microsoft monopoly though ;)

> Eight new laptops from Acer, ASUS, HP and Lenovo.

From the article:

> Laptop shopping is harder than it should be. You can easily get lost in a sea of numbers and technical specs, and it's hard to know what products will actually give you what you need, at the price you want.

Kind of funny...

i3/8GB/128GB/1080p IPS + webcam

Essentially they have defined "acceptable" performance across the board and given that a name. If I was looking for cheap hardware it ticks the boxes just about. "AI" is just a transparent marketing attempt at throwing a hot buzzword that most people don't understand into the mix.

Not awful but it really could do with a more ambitious tier, a lot of manufacturers will meet the requirements as set out (all laptops shown have 1080p displays, which is disappointing as many chromebooks had better before, 3:2 and 4k displays). We had 16GB chromebook options nearly a decade ago (mar 2015).

In fact I think would have been preferable if they made this the chromebook minimum requirements and called those with less "chromebook lite" ("Go" already served as this I think?); because celeron/4GB/64GB/<1080p display/webcam is really pushing things for a new device in late 2023 onwards, even as a facebook machine.

PS anyone responsible for the chromebook site out there, most of the device information pages are 404'ing; https://www.google.com/chromebook/discover/pdp-asus-chromebo...

> PS anyone responsible for the chromebook site out there

Thanks, not responsible but I've already reported one other 404'ing link to the author and will pass this on too.

You are seriously overestimating how much computing power people need and underestimating the capabilities of those laptops.

Very few people "need" more than a Pentium 4, but there are a lot of technically sufficient, practically unusable laptops out there. Modern Celerons dance that line of "usable on the web now, but who knows what next year brings" quite delicately.

My benchmark is "can this play an HD Youtube video full screen". Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task, but with remote education in the state that it's at, that would make life very hard for its users.

I've also seen laptops go from usable to unusable because everyone switched codecs and suddenly the hardware acceleration didn't work anymore.

I think an i3 with a modest amount of RAM is a good decision for a baseline. You can get away with less, but you'll have to constantly maintain your laptop to do so, tweaking settings as the computer ages and acceleration support dies out. For most people, the device will just slow down to a crawl.

An i3 and 8GB of RAM are technically overspecced today, but in five years time you'll be happy you didn't buy the Celeron.

11th gen intel processors or higher have AV1 decoding on top of all the other hardware accelerated codecs. This means that watching multimedia for the foreseeable future will be a lag free experience.

Will Google Meet actually utilize that?

A pentium 4 would burn through your battery within minutes (not to mention your skin).

Most people absolutely NEED better than a pentium 4.

A pentium 4 would leave people without any reasonable means to even play modern video codecs

> Many cheap Windows laptops will struggle at this task

There's not a single cheap Windows laptop that will even vaguely 'struggle' at this task given that the video decode is hardware accelerated. Even a RPI can manage that task. I have set-top box PCs with dual core Celeron 1037U processors which are more than ten years old which don't 'struggle' at this task even if you throw them a x265 video which their hardware decode ASIC doesn't support.

8GB of volatile memory will be a swapfest every time a "modern" browser opens.

Try it out in a VM, open 10+ pages from your bookmarks.

Isn't that what the base M1 Air ships with?

Apple's computers appear to have working memory management, whilst Linux doesn't. Anecdotally, an old 8GiB intel mac feels fine, an enormously more powerful 16 GiB linux laptop with Gnome is basically unusable (but runs great once you seriously bump up the RAM).

As a dev of multiple languages, distro maintainer, general experimenter-with-things and basic ML user - Linux with 8GB works perfectly fine here. Sounds like something else is happening with your system.

Linux doesn't deal well with OOM situations but those don't really apply here. 10 tabs in FF brings me to 3.5 gigs total system use, which is plenty of buffer to avoid swapping and OOM freezes.

So I have an old PC with i5 (Gen. 1, circa 2010 or 2011), and 4x 2 GB of ram. One 2 GB module broke and I hadn’t bothered to replace it for years, living with 6 GB. It runs Fedora Workstation 38, with Gnome. It runs it very well, and I came from more than a decade of MacBooks with 16 GB of ram. It runs it so well I don’t notice it’s just 6 GB in there.

I don't doubt you, but maybe your usage was never much memory constrained on either macOS or linux? What sort of software are you running? For what it's worth, I've got an even lower spec machine (4GiB), which works fine for light browsing and similar. But the minimum I need to run smoothly and simultaneously for a work machine is a browser (with plenty of tabs) and some mix of editors and IDEs. Linux craps for me with amounts of RAM that are way beyond what on a mac would still work fine. I don't think there's one single cause for that (e.g. safari is less of a resource hog than what's available on linux, zfs, which I happen to use, is better than apfs but probably also a bit more memory hungry, apple has virtual memory compression by default etc.).

Purely out of curiosity, what do

     ps -A -osize,cmd | awk '/[g]nome/{t+=$1}END{print t/1024^2 "GiB"}'

and awk '$1 == "Pss:" {t+=$2}END{print t*1024^-2 "GiB"}' $(ps -A -opid,cmd | awk '/[g]nome/{print "/proc/" $1 "/smaps"}')

print on your machine?

You absolutely have to install a form of ad blocking.

So many web sites now have multiple hundreds of MBs in payload when you visit. I agree that 8GB is the bare minimum.

It's sad :(

With 17 tabs open I managed to just about reach 4 gigs in use. This is the entire system, not just the browser. In fact, if I open Witcher 3 in the background with 10 tabs open I just barely get to 8.5 gigs in use.

I don't think your experience is generalizable.

Eh, I have an 8GB Chromebook and I start to notice issues at around 100 open tabs, with the Linux VM running, Obsidian, and VS Code.

So you're a bit off.

I haven't had that issue with Chromebooks in general. Memory management seems to be decent.

Yep ChromeOS runs with MGLRU by default, long before it was merged upstream.

Browser RAM usage is bad but exaggerated. You won't reach 8GB doing this. Maybe like 4.

My three year old Android budget phone has the same specs, more or less.

A laptop has to have more.

It doesn't have to. In fact, your android phone could do all the things it does on a daily basis with far less. I'd love to get stats on how many people are not using their ultra high resolution displays at the maximum resolution and dont even know it, since it's a toggle in the settings to enable it.

The problem is not what people need but what Js app needs :)

They don't come with reasonable displays.

My previous experience with low-end intel hardware has been universally negative, so I assumed the i3's are terrible. Passmark says they are far better than I would have guessed:

M1 performance at 4x the wattage.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100

So, either these get hot and are power-outlet-dependent, or they throttle badly.

I wonder if suspend / resume works reliably. It did not for the last 4 intel laptops I owned, regardless of OS. That included Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Maybe the AMD ones are decent. It's a shame about the screen (and bizarre bios) though.

My guess is that they throttle a bit. ChromeOS machines tend to sleep and resume really well and sacrifice performance for battery.

In a world full of low end garbage windows machines, it actually makes them a pretty nice little niche. Lots of consumers would likely find them much better than a lot of the $1-200 more expensive Windows laptops.

That's a desktop processor. These will all likely contain u series processors.

> They don't come with reasonable displays

How do you define "reasonable"? My Asus Chromebook has this display, which I find very reasonable for work:

- 14” LED-backlit Full HD (1920 x 1080) 16:9 display

- Four-way NanoEdge display with 85% screen-to-body ratio

- 4.9mm-thin side bezel and 7mm bottom bezel

- Wide 100% sRGB color gamut

- 178° wide-view technology

Yours is not the average Chromebook. It probably cost you at least $450 is my guess.

> either these get hot and are power-outlet-dependent, or they throttle badly

Probably all three at the same time.

People need Google Meet. Google Meet will melt your CPU on most laptops.

Most of Google's apps will, come to think of it.

Meet has the sorta unique problem of using video encoding that most modern hardware doesn't accelerate, meaning the CPU ends up taking it. Zoom just uses the typical H.264.

Have you actually used a Chromebook, like, spent more than 10 hours working on them? If not, you should try such a laptop out and then come back with your opinion. Even Chromebooks with Celeron processors are very usable and beat Windows laptops with the same specs by miles.

Also want to point out high-end Chromebooks are expensive and likely don't sell very well due to its market. So here it is striking a balance. Which is why I won't be buying one of these. But other people will.

Chrome OS is fundamentally limited in what it can do, so I understand why no one would want to pay for overpowered hardware. Will not be buying one either.

Are you aware of the crostini subsystem? You can run linux apps, you have a shell, it's a vm separated from the rest of the system, but everything works like native apps. X window apps look normal. You can run anything, firefox, emacsx, dev tools.

So now you can run android apps safely and directly, you have the ubiquitious chrome browser world running, with a bunch of chrome-os things that making it a great environment for a lot of things. And you can run linux where you are root, you can do basically anything. The one limitation was recursive vms, I wonder if they enabled that yet.

first time I hear about recursive vm. I suppose it means running a vm inside a vm. now curious. why would one want to do that ?

Think of recursive as running dev tools that are running vms in them, say running mulitpass inside crostini - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/multipass-is-a-new-tool....

Nested VMs work in Crostin on my 2021 Lenovo Flex 5i Chromebook.

Can you give an example so I can try it on mine? I tried 3 years ago and it didn't work, but they are constantly enhancing it.

    sudo apt-get install qemu-system-x86
    qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -smp 4 -cdrom <some live linux iso>

This, a marketing term defining a set of specifications, is also almost exactly what "Ultrabook" does, for the opposite (upper) end of the market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook

Also, a Chromebook is a specifically prepared device with a highly customized Linux OS that is designed to interface very well with Google's services.

Imagine if your iPhone just stored everything in iCloud and didn't need or use much local storage; that's similar to what the original vision of a Chromebook was, and it was pretty successful at that (just ask a good percentage of school-aged children in the United States.)

Obviously, it's not for everyone, but it's probably perfect for a lot of potential use cases, and I know some serious developers exist who actually spend all their time on some of the great Chromebooks that are out there, and they're doing it by choice.

TLDR; you are not the target market. there is an audience in India for example of billions, that use FB lite with less features due to cost, limited bandwidth, etc

Does anyone here have one of these framework chromebooks https://frame.work/products/laptop-chromebook-12-gen-intel? Haven't seen many impressions on it so I've been hesitant to buy one. But it looks pretty good spec wise.

Framework and chromeos feel like a very strange combination to me.

Hard disagree from me. I've had a lot of Chromebooks and 3 frameworks, and it's a terrific match IMHO. I do wish you could switch back and forth between Linux and Chromebook without replacing the main board, but even that is a great fit. As needs change, you have options. Chromebook is great for many users especially now that it runs Linux apps, and can even be a very capable dev machine.

You need to swap out the mainboard to install Linux?

It's the other way around. If you want ChromeOS (in particular with its Verified Boot system for the OS image [1]), you need special hardware that comes with Chromebooks, including the Framework Chromebook. That has nothing to do with the ability to run Linux, though.

If you don't care about Verified Boot, you can install ChromeOS-Flex on a Framework Linux device (https://www.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/um0mk6/chromeos_...)

On the other hand, installing Linux on Chromebook hardware is straightforward.

The options are:

1. Use the Debian Linux VM (Crostini) that is already present on Chromebooks:

https://chromeos.dev/en/linux

All you do is click on a few buttons in the settings. This approach preserves Verified Boot.

If you want to replace ChromeOS on a Chromebook with a Linux distro, you can use Crouton: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

This approach removes verified boot.

1. https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...

Okay, that's what i thought.

IIRC Flex does not have Android support

> I do wish you could switch back and forth between Linux and Chromebook without replacing the main board

Crouton? It won't have full capabilities being in a chroot, but I remember it being more than adequate for almost everything I needed it for. 5 years ago.

Sorry I was pretty unclear. By "Linux" here I meant, "a traditional Linux distro" not just Linux inside the Chromebook. Crouton is amazing but pretty outdated at this point not being kept up to date, but crostini is, and neither of those require a main board swap

Gotcha. Yeah see I had no clue Crouton was unmaintained. Shows how long its been since I've used a Chromebook I guess. I'm not even familiar with Crostini. Only heard the name.

Imagine all the schools with Chromebooks deployed, suddenly there's an option for their own IT staff to easily replace broken parts instead of buying new Chromebooks or sending them elsewhere to repair. Decent market for that.

This has existed for a while:

https://edu.google.com/chromebooks/chromebook-repairability

Some school districts have summer internship programs for students interested in learning how to do the repairs.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-encourages-kids-to-repair-...

You can upgrade and repair your laptop!

But after a few years you can no longer update your web browser.

I have one. 64GB of memory and 2TB NVME. Pretty cool to be able to run android apps, crostini (lxd) and KVM machines (with nested virt) all at the same time.

Yeah thats why it’s so appealing. Neat, what kind of battery life do you get? And how are temps/thermals?

Can you get it with a standard bios (or flash one)?

I have no interest in Chrome OS, but I'd like a framework laptop that reliably runs Linux out of the box without setting the kernel taint bit.

Can you elaborate ?

Can I run any android app as if it were running on a phone ?

I am specifically thinking of running the 'lyft' app and booking a car ... is that possible ?

You can run most Android apps, but the developer can opt out of it showing as compatible for Chromebooks on the Play Store I believe. You can also sideload APKs.

Some apps can be resized well, others are stuck in their default size and orientation. Compatibility is pretty mature and solid at this point. They can also be pinned and float which is kinda cool.

I am able to download and sign in to Lyft app on my Chromebook but didn't try to book a ride with it.

Minor side note, but you might be interested to know that https://ride.lyft.com/ exists. I was surprised and happy when I learned that.

None of those capabilities are specific to the framework laptop though? Or are you referring to the high ram enabling multiple VMs?

It's a last gen CPU and will soon be two gens out of date. Makes no sense to pay list price for it.

I read framework Chromebook and got excited... it's the price of a MacBook Air?!??!

It's got better components than most intel chromebooks. I updated my storage and ram. But yeah, it ain't the cheapest one.

I'd buy a Chromebook if I can kick Google out of the picture, use the hardware to run Linux in full control and still get outstanding battery life. Like a poor man's(or smart man's? ) M* Macs.

Why dont I just buy regular Windows laptop then? because they pay Windows tax and often come with weird power hungry choices because windows....

Can you not already do that? You can do enable developer mode and from there (in theory) it’s possible to use them as regular PCs and boot any Linux distro or even Windows. I don’t know about things like battery life though

You need to remove a write-protection screw from the logic board and replace the firmware, or the Chromebook will prompt you to factory-reset it at each boot. Very annoying, makes it feel like a useless toy.

^^ very good to know. Thanks for that.

I think that’s not the case any more. I didn’t have to do this

Edit: “In newer devices, we've moved away from the WP signal being controlled by a physical screw and to a separate chip controlling the WP signal.”

> run Linux in full control and still get outstanding battery life.

Why do you believe this would be the outcome? Good battery life is an attribute of software, not hardware. The likely outcome of slapping Fedora on a Chromebook will be exceedingly poor battery life and prolonged frustration as you attempt to figure out why it doesn't have energy efficiency parity with ChromeOS.

This hasn't been my experience with other devices that have upstreamed kernel device drivers. Worst case, you run powertop (or whatever), and change a few entries in /proc and /sys.

This is even true for phones. For instance, stock GrapheneOS gets 3-4x the battery life of stock Android on my Pixel 6 Pro.

(Graphene can't run many things from the android store until you install Google Play Services. That then reduces the battery life back to stock Android levels, except stuff is buggy. I gave up on using it.)

Gave up on using sandboxed Play Services, or GrapheneOS? I had Play Services on my last Pixel until I broke it. Got another of the same phone and installed GrapheneOS again, but didn't install Play nor Services, and honestly F-Droid has almost everything I need. The few apps I have from Play Store, I get through Aurora Store, and they work without Play Services with no complaints.

What do you mean by sandboxed? Is it any different to any other ROM?

They basically made Play and Play Services userland, to limit its snooping access.

https://grapheneos.org/usage#sandboxed-google-play

Oh wow, thanks for the link.

While you need a (burner) gmail to login, you aren't obligated to use Google services on a Chromebook. The built-in Linux VM scratches the Linux development itch for me.

If you run vanilla Linux you don't get the outstanding battery life. ChromeOS runs a Google kernel and has all sorts of power management special sauce. I tried a few distros on an older Chromebook running SeaBIOS and I got maybe 60% of the runtime, not unlike Linux vs. Windows on my Framework 13.

A lot of the Chromebook's battery saving features are the result of features of ChromeOS, not the Linux kernel, i.e. ChromeOS uses ML to predict how fast to charge the battery [1]. Tight integration between hardware and software has its advantages, just like with Apple products.

If you want the same battery life without ChromeOS, you need to talk to your preferred Linux distribution vendor and ask them to implement similar features.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892651/chromeos-117-sta...

You can buy the Framework Chromebook, although the battery life with Fedora is significantly worse than Windows

I don't see why it needs to be a Chromebook. You can install Linux on a regular Windows laptop, and you're probably not really paying extra for Windows preinstalled.

You absolutely can run full Linux on a Chromebook. I've done it with four.

There are great resources here:

https://mrchromebox.tech

I recently used 3x Dell 5190 and 1x Dell 3100 as touch-capable displays built into wooden cabinets running a Pygame app to communicate with a microcontroller and assorted electronics as part of a science festival booth.

https://justinmiller.io/posts/2023/09/18/wave-caught/

The machines are rugged, have great battery life & durable screens, enough USB ports, space to run plenty of stuff, and I got them for $60 a piece refurbished and guaranteed good screen quality.

I've been quite pleasantly surprised by the $250 Chromebook I got from Costco nearly a year ago when my Linux machine's hardware started failing. I originally got it because it was the quickest way to have something for writing emails that wasn't my phone. I ended up quite happy with it though.

It does everything I need outside of heavier duty programming, and I don't do so much of that in my spare time these days. You can code with it; I set up a for-fun Elixir/Phoenix project that I coded mostly on the Chromebook.

I do a lot of writing/communicating and I don't need anything more than what this computer provides.

This is fairly close to my revelation as well. I don't run "heavier duty programming" as OP says local anyhow. VSCode runs wonderfully, battery lasts forever and I run anything beyond trivial in some cloud instance. They are so light, the battery lasts so long and they are so cheap mine just bounces around in my backpack and is always with me.

Would a local nodejs webserver be easily doable for web dev? It's sorta ok on the cloud as long as you can SSH tunnel and run the browser locally, but you'd have to either sync code changes or use Vim over SSH (not always nice due to latency).

Yes, people do that kind of thing.

>All Chromebook Plus laptops come with the the following guaranteed hardware specs:

I feel like these sorts of guarantees used to be useful, but now I'm not sure.

Outside of my work computer, I buy off-lease ThinkPads for use around the home (ie family computers). I think the oldest one still in use is a 3rd generation i7. And it's totally fine as a daily driver.

On the other side, I bought an off-lease desktop that has a 7th gen(?) quad-core 8 thread i7 with 32GB of RAM, and it's not going to allow me to run Windows 11. Kind of silly.

e-waste is a sad thing. Hopefully you can use those computers with Linux or similar for long after Microsoft says they're garbage.

By e-waste here I mean: Perfectly good working hardware that gets an arbitrary EoL solely based on software support.

Interesting that there aren't any ARM based systems that made the performance cut.

It is especially funny because the pitch seems pretty similar to the Ultrabook pitch (thin and lights, but the branding guarantees some performance hurdle was passed—started more or less at the same time as the original Chromebook).

ChromeOS was of course notable as a laptop OS on both ARM and x86.

I suspect the whole Ultrabook thing kinda fizzled out as it became apparent that ARM was not getting much traction in laptops (other than Apple, but then, they are always an outlier).

The classic arm for ChromeOS is terrible, mostly because they cheaped out on CPU extensions and storage, and memory bandwidth. They mostly repurposed those cheap Android tablet designs that die after a year.

I use the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet 5 Chromebook (picked it up for $279 from Best Buy) and it is pretty amazing. OLED screen, ARM performance that's pretty good, a tablet that comes with a keyboard.

It's a great Chromebook for on the go stuff.

I have a Duet 5 and a Duet 3 (smaller form factor, ideal for reading in bed). I like being able to run most Android programs, and my go-to software suite, Emacs, TeXLive, and various Scheme systems, runs fine on Debian Bookworm. I tried Crouton years ago, did not like it; but Crostini seems to work very well. I rarely notice lag, except sometimes when logging in.

There are some negatives: some Android apps are flaky, and the Linux environment has a few restrictions. And of course the whole requirement to log in with a Google account. But as a daily driver, the device is inexpensive and highly usable.

its tradeoff for performance (acceptable for web browsing) vs battery life.

The key thing here is specifying 8Gb RAM as minimum spec and branding it accordingly.

What's hurt Chromebook's reputation is people buying discounted/value priced 4Gb ones, struggling with performance and concluding it's a terrible platform.

I'm intellectually curious what the experience of web-based video editing and Photoshop are like for anyone that actually needs to use these tools as part of their repeat workflow.

i agree, but i think they should have gone the other way. "chromebook plus" makes it sound like a premium product that you probably don't need. minimum 8GB of ram should be the standard configuration that most people go for. The people buying Chromebooks with 4GB of ram aren't going to be put off because it doesn't have the "chromebook plus" branding on it.

if they want to help the chromebook's reputation, they should be calling this the minimum spec for a chromebook, and putting "chromebook lite" or similar branding on the ones that don't meet it.

They do this with Android... follow certain specs (and other requirements) and you can have the Google suite of apps + Play Store access. If you don't, you're own your own.

It would be great if they could do that with Chromebooks - follow a minimum spec or otherwise <insert punishment>. Problem is, there isn't anything to hold back or punish with. Which leaves them in a situation where, other than a "made for Chromebook" endorsement that can be withheld, there's nothing to stop anyone making any laptop of any spec and calling it "Chromebook".

There absolutely is. Even more than there is on android.

Chromebook is a google trademark, and chromebook-branded devices are tightly controlled by google. I believe that OEMs have to pick from a predetermined set of approved mainboard and CPU combos. OS images and Software updates are delivered directly from google.

> What's hurt Chromebook's reputation is people buying discounted/value priced 4Gb ones, struggling with performance and concluding it's a terrible platform.

Doesn't help that they are made by a company that is now more icky than Microsoft and deservedly so IMO.

I'm a big fan of Chromebooks, but I do find myself wondering at the direction they are heading. I hope they stand by traditional Googley values of open and interactive, rather than a more Apple approach of locking things down.

I'm really, amazingly happy that they added Linux support. Are the kernel contributions and other things that make the Chromebook battery life so good being upstreamed? Are they super specific to Chromebook hardware or is that something that benefits all Linux users?

With all the AI stuff being added "directly to ChromeOS", is the OS getting more locked down and less owner-hackable? If one enables dev mode, do you lose access to features?

Chromebooks are good products for people who need to be on a budget. With Linux container support, a Chromebook can do anything, but not the best for software development.

Hows the stability/userability?

After running Fedora, I've noticed ~100% of my bugs come from using Nividia. I imagine going directly to CPU makes running linux easy?

My Raspi4 had basically no problems once I installed it on the final TV I'd be using main.

Stability is solid, but so is Linux's usually. Even the unholy trinity of AMD iGPU + Nvidia Optimus dGPU + X¹¹ hasn't caused any driver issues yet for me.

Usability, YMMV. Out of the box it's okay-ish, but it's hard to improve it. Screenshotting/desktop recording, e.g.: The included tool only does the bare minimum (can't even draw arrows on screenshots), and there's almost no ChromeOS native third-party software to pick up the slack. In many other cases, Android apps or Linux desktop applications can be substituted, but screen sharing is just too borked for screenshotting/recording to work reliably. Meanwhile, Chrome browser addons are limited to Chrome tabs.

It runs git, vim (or emacs, if you're feeling frisky) and docker, that covers a lot of software dev use cases.

VSCode, too.

And for people who just want to use email and web. My father-in-law is not computer literate at all and had continual issues with his Windows laptop, so I ended up being his regular IT support. For his birthday we got him a Chromebook and I haven't had a single support call from him since.

They make great corporate devices, depending on the needs of your users. Great security with very minimal configuration, which is really not the case for most of the competition.

Introduction failed at one of my workplaces for a three big reasons (in the order they arose during the small scale trial):

1. Incompatibility with our stack for our front line staff.

2. No Excel which was preferred internally and externally

3. No Word which to this day is used by many customers and external vendors

Now the first one may well not be an issue if one were setting up a new company today but the third is not an issue now with Google Docs being able to parse docx well but at the time it caused shenanigans. We ended up migrating all staff to google docs while on windows and giving Microsoft office licences to particular users who could justify it from a technical perspective (rather than an “i don’t want to learn new tech” perspective).

Excel, though, is still untouchable at a certain level. Demonstrations of macros that took moments in excel taking eternities in sheets. Poor data wrangling capabilities. Obviously some features simply not existing at all.

I guess the company saved millions over some period by switching to mostly being a google shop but native Excel would be worth its weight in gold to Microsoft.

O365 Excel and Word both work pretty darn well in a browser and there are native Android versions as well. Fully capable of opening/editing random documents.

But yeah if you're doing Hardcore Excel Stuff you are pretty much required to run it in Windows. Even the Mac version isn't close enough.

In addition to employees sometimes needing a native app like Photoshop, we also ran into some issues with build quality of some of the devices. Solvable by buying higher end chromebooks, but then you undercut some of the cost savings.

Provisioning, backup, device replacement, security were all a breeze though.

Chromebooks can absolutely be used for serious coding, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396727

Yeah, it took me five minutes to set up a dev environment with Postgres and other containerized services. No performance issues. Full stack web development is a big chunk of the market...

Sure, maybe AAA gamedev isn't gonna work on a Chromebook.

How does this work? Is there a bash shell and containers available within a Chromebook or did you install it yourself?

https://chromeos.dev/en/linux

I got my wife a chromebook a few years ago to replace her mbp that died unexpectedly right when she needed a laptop. I figured she would use it for a while and then we would get her a new Mac and hand-down the chromebook to one of the kids.

Almost five years later, though, she's still using it and loves it. She uses it for everything, doesn't play games or need to run heavy compute locally, and now that Docs and Sheets can open Office documents natively (as opposed to conversion, which it used to do), there's really nothing she needs beyond that.

Recently I mentioned that the new Macs that had come out had a great battery life/performance profile and did she want to switch back - and she had little interest in it. They're pretty capable machines for general purpose use.

That's anecdata, of course, but if I think back to setting my grandmother up with a mac mini many years ago, if I were doing that today I would absolutely get her a chromebook for the security and data reliability alone.

A $300 Chromebook is more than enough for 90%+ of the population, but it's really the marketing that gets them to spend 5-10x as much on fancier hardware. No one needs an M2 Max chip to browse Facebook/Reddit and write Google docs.

Self-replying because I did think of something that is an annoyance, which is the lack of iMessage/Messages support on the chromebook. We have iphones, so we can still communicate with each other, but I get my messages on my mac laptop, which helps me see high priority stuff while working, and she doesn't. Annoyance, not a deal-breaker.

Chromebooks do have that integration with the Google Messages app on Android though, unsurprisingly.

+1 on it being a really nice quality of life feature.

Careful with giving Chromebooks to the elderly. As someone used to macs, I found my dad’s Chromebook (given to him by one of my siblings) to have astonishingly limited and poorly-functioning accessibility settings.

IDK maybe they’ve gotten better, but at least 2-3 years ago they were unimpressive on that front, certainly.

I know the tensor power pixelbook was shutdown and I never heard the actual reason just a bunch of speculation about costs/profitability which is probably true.

It's a shame that there isn't more competition and development in the neural asic world to harness the power of llms/generative AI on a low power, cheap hardware platform like the pixelbook line. For someone that invented the TPU they have done a not so great job of ensuring it's commercialization and support. Both on the hardware and software side.

The coral edge tpu seemed to be the right high level idea but without proper execution.

https://github.com/google-coral/edgetpu/issues/668

The "more performance" is that the new line has newer hardware. It's not like the OS is doing something interesting or new - this is what you would expect when buying a new laptop versus an old laptop.

The OS features seem like fairly basic QOL wins, at best. I don't really care about a generative AI background for my video calls or whatever.

I guess if I were in the market for a new chromebook I'd say "oh, there are some new ones, I'll check those out" but that's kinda it.

Yeah. The hardware is solid, but there's already been Chromebooks announced for this (or last) year's lineup with equal or better specs.

And the AI features smell a lot like "we literally have no idea what AI is good for, we'll just throw it at everything and see what sticks".

The AI features seem to just be those that can achieve adequate performance on this amount of hardware.

This is a marketing/branding thing Google is starting this year. It isn't that the hardware is newer, it is that Google is trying to draw a line in the sand between the $159 machines and the $400 machines. Machines with a less than Core i3/Ryzen 7000 won't be branded as such, even if they come out next year. They want a buyer to walk into a store and see A $159 Chromebook and a $400 Chromebook Plus and have and idea that the money goes somewhere and gives you 'more'.

Seems like it makes it easier to send your low-needs user shopping on their own. Hey, get a chromebook+, rather than having to go with them or find out where they're shopping and give them a list of ok models to buy.

There have always been chromebooks with better or worse choices of hardware. This selection is certainly good. Personally, I don't shy away from Intel's mainstream core Pentium/Celeron either especially in generations where the core count is the same as i3. But Intel also sells Pentium/Celeron branded atom-series chips that I avoid because of past experience with sluggish systems and reports that they're harder to get 3rd party firmware for (once ChromeOS updates stop happening, I want to be able to put something else on these, if the thing still works)

The good thing is that Intel will probably help here. The 15th gen CPUS are branded as Intel Processor, Intel Core Processor, and Intel Core Ultra Processor. In this: Intel Processor -> Atom, Pentium, Celeron Core -> i3, i5 Core Ultra -> i7, i9

You can just say 'buy the Core CPU, no numbers, no other words'

For $400, I get a regular laptop.

But then you would have to install your OS yourself! The horror!

"Add humor and emojis" to a social media post [1]. This is not too far away from having an AI bot posting cool stuff for you.

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...

Such a shame this isn't ARM, and they stuck with Intel. The battery life vs performance is just too good.

Yeah ChromeOS ARM support is already there, they just need the hardware. I dabbled with the Linux container support on my Lenovo Duet and on a larger more powerful device it would be totally usable. But it seems all the ARM devices are 4GB RAM configs with weak SoC's.

Those look interesting, definitely a step in the right direction. It's kinda surprising that Samsung is not part of this lineup when they were the spearhead of decently powerful Chromebooks. Did Google come with contractual obligations that made it a hard sell ? At least Lenovo is in it.

A weirder aspect of this: why North America only ? In particular, Lenovo or Acer have no such geographical bias, does it mean we'll have a west/east split, with more advanced models only available in Asian markets again ?

Edit: FHD was probably the reasons Samsung is not part of this. That's an awfully low resolution compared to what they've been pushing up until now.

> In Canada and Europe, new Chromebook Plus laptops will be available starting on October 9, 2023.

It's not North America only.

What constitutes a "Plus" Chromebooks is very easily defined now, but what about in 6-12 months? Will the Plus moniker evolve continuously or is this a one-time promotion to sell this hardware generation?

This is google trying to get people more interested in Chromebooks and ChromeOS. ChromeOS device sales have dropped faster and farther than any other compute device in the past year.

This is nice, but I wish there were smaller/more portable options. I'd love a 12-13" chromebook with a thin body design that's closer to 2 lbs.

I'm disappointed that their embed demo video showed at 360p when I have a fibre connection and shows Spanish when I have English captions selected, but I'm only a little surprised. You might think that when they control both frontends and backends end-to-end that they could do it right. Why should people trust a product from a "web company" that can't play a video properly?

I thought Mac was a bad walled-garden, and M$ was being too pushy with the M$ account requirements, but the Chromebook won't even function without a Google account, and they are eager to retire them ASAP. I was burned once and would never do it again.

I bought a Lenovo Flex (I think that’s what it is called) from the onset of the pandemic for my kid. It is a convertible tablet. It works perfectly except now it is slow. Is there any suggestion for a replacement with similar tablet but a bit beefy?

It’s worth mentioning that ChromeOS is one of the most secure operating systems.

Because it's used less...

If I need a thin client computer, i.e. a good 4k screen, ~1kg weight and ability to run Remote Desktop, performance and storage don't matter, what would be the best option?

M1 Mackbook Air

2.5k screen, 1.3kg, rather expensive for a thin client. I thought one of those chromebooks might fit.

Even for a thin client I wouldn't take significantly worse battery life and performance to lose 290 grams.

"~1kg weight" - LG Gram comes to mind

Does anyone know if the plus models are restricted to ChromeOS only like the older models and, if that's the case, if they can be unlocked like most of the older ones?

I kind of expected google to roll out their own ARM processors

Google has had delays trying to design their own processors (for smartphones): https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-googles-effor...

The existence of ChromeOS Flex dulls the excitement here for me, but this is good for people who can’t install ChromeOS on their (old) laptops.

What is the OS on these? Is it Linux based but very limited? Can you install a normal Linux distro on it without hacking an entire universe?

It's Linux and not limited in any tangible way.

Only selected models support Linux environment, which is anyway executed on its own containarized VM.

Plus 128 GB SSD is a severe limitation for modern day storage requirements.

Is there an x86 Chromebook you can buy today that won’t run it?

The few I see on European shopping malls, being discounted until someone picks them up.

Always have Linux support disabled on the settings pane, as "this device is not supported" kind of message.

Here are the list of models that support the Linux VM, basic everything released since 2019.

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/chro...

I am fully aware of that list, does not change the reality of devices in Media Market showing lack of support.

They are likely old inventory then.

It's Chrome OS. It runs a Linux kernel but by default it's designed to be a very simplified, locked-down OS that runs the Chrome browser and Android apps.

It also has a built-in Linux development environment that you can enable, which runs in a mini VM. It gives you a full Debian system, without any risk of messing up the built-in OS.

If you don't want Chrome OS at all, it's definitely possible to just install Linux.

I'd like to buy a cheapo Chromebook with Intel N100, IPS LCD, and 8GB (hopefully 16GB RAM). It should be sweet spot.

Intel Core i3, designed for performance?!?

Not a celeron in sight - hurrah!

This will make the Amazon query a lot easier - no more wading through loads of 2 or 3 gen old celeron shite.

Perfect

The quality of life feature that's missing is a finger print sensor.

Does anyone know how long the support model is for Chromebooks?

10 years of full OS updates.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/automatic...

If the Chromebook project itself survives so long.

It has been around for 12 years so far. Also, the OS is mostly open source, and modulo some security features, can be run on non-Chromebook hardware.

So even if Google stops developing it, it can be carried forward.

Oh definitely. But there wouldn’t be Google’s updates to a dead project, even if it wouldn’t stop working like Jamboards.

Is the Photoshop via chrome or is this a native application?

Via Chrome. They demoed it a while ago, and I can’t find any changes to that since. Basically streaming from a cloud instance.

FHD resolution in 2023 is dead in the water for anything but children or gamers on low end devices.

Roughly 7-8 years ago I was going to be traveling and didn't have a suitable machine to take with me so I went online and found an Acer CB3 for $100 new– I think the retail then was double that, maybe a little more. I bought two, one for myself and one for my mom who was struggling with her aging MacBook both in operation and physical heft. I immediately dropped crouton onto mine and made it my Linux daily driver for the next year.

It ran xfce, emacs, and firefox like butter, silently, and never got warmer than a good lap friend. Battery life for (literally) days. It looked good too, with a very simple white case and sturdy black keycaps. The trackpad even was fine. When my work started to involve heavy graphics and multimedia again my daily use dropped, mostly replaced by a newer Mac, and was eventually relegated to closet storage not to be charged or even turned on for at least two years.

Now it's 2023, my mom stopped using hers maybe two years ago in favor of a new and even more portable iPad. I have a daughter who is 3 approaching 4. She's interested in computers, tries to touch type on my desk computer, and is no longer a walking hazard to all non-stationary objects. I dug the old Chromebook out of the closet, plugged it in, and the damn thing works. Once the OS connected to the internet it was kind enough to inform me that its version of ChromeOS was EOL and and that there were no newer supported versions for my hardware. But it works. Even browsing the web normally has no issues beyond the occasional spruce goose'd site which could probably bring down the heftiest workstation anyway. It hasn't been locked out of any usage that I can tell but hopefully soon I'll be able to sit down and see to removing ChromeOS entirely for a fresh linux install.

There isn't much of a point to all that I've typed out besides some personal nostalgia. I tend to agree with all the comments which come up about Google's worsening business practices in general, surveillance-enabling behaviour, lack of product support, etc. While they seem to still be investing in it, I hope this product space doesn't eventually die in Google's hands. It's disappointing to me that there are not multiple vendors trying to offer something similar: a streamlined linux desktop experience on decent hardware that isn't fussy and is cheap.

Recently I had to setup a Windows computer and a Macbook.

Both sucked. It was miserable. Lots of dialog after dialog after dialog. Disabling crap just to get like functional local file storage. Turning off news and stocks and notifications galore.

Linux is fine in this regard as a poweruser but has it's own rough edges. I think for the moment it is actually ahead despite occasionally having to pop into terminal for the odd task.

I just can't believe how horrible using a computer is for a non-poweruser. It is abusive. No wonder so many people hate computers when this is the experience they have.

>I just can't believe how horrible using a computer is for a non-poweruser.

I think it's more that computers have filesystems and a ton of other stuff--unrelated to crapware in many cases--that a lot of people don't understand, don't want to understand, and that a lot of people reading this are probably somewhat contemptuous of them not understanding. So they use phones that don't require them to understand any of that stuff and ask family/friends to help them when they get out of their very narrow comfort zone for some reason.

> don't understand, don't want to understand

They're a threshold for when things are complicated and not wanting to understand something is fair. But as an adult, you very likely have a home with an address, which contains a room with a common name, which contains a folder, which contains your documents (birth certificate or something similar). That means you already understand filesystems. As a non-poweruser that's all there is to it - beyond that is just being uncomfortable with something you haven't encountered.

As someone who actually works with a lot of basic computer users, you are incorrect.

Nobody has ever struggled to understand files or folders. My 80 year old aunt has a preference for the names of her email folders. My 11 year old nephew has a sorting system for his little game mods.

No the main issue is exclusively "crap". To quote my mom on a recent call: "How do I make this thing go away?" (It was a notification about some new cloud service).

Breaking user patterns is a close second - especially anything to do with file management.

> Nobody has ever struggled to understand files or folders.

It sounds more like your family members have an aptitude for pragmatic organizational habits. This works for my parents but a common enough question from others is along the lines of "what do you mean where did I put it, I thought the computer was supposed to remember it?!" No amount of encouragement around the fact that they must have saved, likely named, and at least reopened a particular document dozens of times makes the concept stick in a satisfying way.

I've had a similar experience. Also that buying replacement power cables is easy and pretty cheap.

On Black Friday a few years ago there was an HP Chromebook with touch screen and 8 GB of RAM on sale for a really good price, enough so that I temporarily lifted my absolute ban on HP products to buy. It was my wife's beloved computer for many years until a kid threw it in anger and shattered the screen D-:

older family members use Chromebooks and it's amazing. All they need it for is social media, bank stuff, browsing news sites. I've bought one 6 years ago and mom has never looked back. We even set it up via hdmi to a tv and watch youtube videos with zero issues.

My seven year old grandson was given a new Chromebook on his first day of second grade in Upper St. Clair, Pa., along with each of his classmates. It stopped working after two weeks and he came home the next day with a new one.

> There isn't much of a point to all that I've typed out besides some personal nostalgia.

There is a very real point: as a society, we don't really need new computers. Some people want new ones, because games, video editing, the usual suspects, but for a large majority of us, including developers, we don't actually need more. Computers from ~5 years ago are enough. Computers with processing power of ~5 years ago are enough.

If that aspect could be more widely spread, maybe we wouldn't have such a frenzy over always new stuff and be content with the old, and have an actual, real impact on climate change, on exploited countries and minors, on pollution. We need to be developing software towards old computers, not new computers. The older the better.

No no, consume! Think of the shareholders!

there's a name for that: consumer durable goods. Computers (and even phones) are just transitioning into that category.

Unfortunately, part of the problem people run into is software/security updates. Microsoft cut off a bunch of PCs from circa 2017 with Windows 11 (though Win10 is still getting updates for now). Google has cut off security patches for machines that were still sold new just a few years ago (and through some vendors...still sold "new" today!). Apple also cuts off updates for sufficiently old PCs. Basically, unless the average person figures out how to install Linux, and it suits their needs, their computers still have a finite shelf life due to software support.

That's good to hear it still worked OK.

I recommend Chromebooks to lots of people who have trouble using Windows and end up calling me when their storage is entirely filled with malware. The issue I had was the really short support/EOL for these things. They finally just switched it up -- I think they now receive 10 years of support, which is even better than Apple's great 7 years. Another reason to use them.

> All Chromebook Plus laptops come with the the following guaranteed hardware specs:

> CPU: Intel Core i3 12th Gen or above, or AMD Ryzen 3 7000 series or above

> RAM: 8GB+

> Storage: 128GB+

> Webcamera: 1080p+ with Temporal Noise Reduction

> Display: Full HD IPS or better display

It feels a little weird and sad that an i3 is the bar to make something "plus" in performance.

In fairness, a 12th Gen i3 is not massively far from an M1. The iX branding has become a little silly lately as a user who is not hardcore pushing the system could not possibly tell the difference between a 1215u and a 1235u.

i3 is probably still associated with "can barely hold 3+ apps open" era but thats not the case for many years now

That seems more like a memory/hard drive issue.

Ever since the Core 2 product line, intel’s CPUs have all been fine for stuff like office use (browsing, editing files, reading email).

Well other than atoms obviously.

I still use a core 2 duo some days. For basic web browsing (albeit with a pihole on the network) and shelling, it works fine. I think it’s the longest running machine I have.

A Thinkpad X200 - not wiped in 13 years (since installing Arch). Truly a frankenstein’s monster of a machine now. Hardware mods are so easy on this thing - I switched to an SSD probably 10 years ago, some RAM upgrades. Upgraded Wi-Fi card a few times (mostly based off mainline kernel driver support). Touchpad a couple times, keyboard at least the same. Keeping Arch running on this machine without wiping everything is the only think keeping my Linux skills sharp in the era of company-issued macs.

A quality-of-life upgrade you might be interested in: https://www.tindie.com/products/mikepdiy/lenovo-charging-por...

I had to replace the charging port in my x220, but I did not use this usb-c one, because I didn't know at the time that it existed. It's a lengthy job (the power port is one of the first parts put into the chassis / last parts to come out) but satisfying.

That is pretty cool.

I installed to an SSD in an enclosure with the hopes that it could become an eternal install that I just bring from machine to machine (perhaps DD-ing over to a new drive as SSDs advance). So far is has gone fine for like 5 or so years, but I haven’t really found the need to upgrade since then, so it is really just living as a single desktop.

Actually, this may have inspired me to try plugging it in to another machine tonight just to make sure it hadn’t gotten too dependent on that hardware. What kind of Frankenstein would I be if my monster was constrained to a single body?

This is the itch that NixOS scratches.

One of these days, it will actually have good UX...

reads in Pee-wee Herman voice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEGywhma69E)

This... is NixOS. Immutable root. It isn't glamorous, or cool, or kid's stuff. It's the most addictive kind of package manager, and it can kill your motivation to work on actual packages. What's really bad is, nobody knows how much you'll need. Every time you use it, you risk your sanity. It isn't worth it.

Look: everybody wants to be cool. But doing it with NixOS doesn't just take long, it could be dead long.

(Disclaimer: I love Nix and couldn't leave it if I tried)

The insane part is that all it needs is good documentation.

Where is it written that steam-run will magically execute most binaries without patching them? Certainly[1] not in the article that tells you how and why to patch binaries!

[1] I see now that it's linked to at the bottom "See also" section. Still awful, IMHO.

> Where is it written that steam-run will magically execute most binaries without patching them?

Somewhere in here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime

But I do get what you're saying. Once Flakes are default, I hope people start a proper push to clear up documentation and streamline the development process. The end-result is amazing, and the perfect OS/packaging system for my needs. The means of getting there... need a lot of work. I'm along for the ride either way.

I did this for a few years with one SSD in various laptops or desktops as logisitics warranted. Desktop at home, 12in Thinkpad while traveling, 14in Thinkpad at work. It was easy to swap drives with the Thinkpad drive bay that they used to have.

Sadly, once most laptops went over to NVME 2280 pcie cards, it got a little too tedious to constantly swap out drives any more, and I started worrying about accidentally breaking them. Also had some weird issues with very poor write speed which I thought was overheating necessating a heat sink, but it turns out nvme speeds are actually just as slow as anything else under real workloads.

My enclosure claims to be Thunderbolt 3 compatible, but I actually don’t know if it is operating as USB-3 or thunderbolt when I boot Linux from it. In general, it is usually fine. Although, I’ve got an OK amount of ram, so sometimes I’ll use a RAM disk if I think it is a problem.

Actually, it is kind of funny, I’ve got an NVME drive inside the actual computer. When I want to do something that requires fast drive speeds, I make a RAM drive. When I want more memory, I swap on the internal NVME drive.

Hypothetically could I end up writing to a file on the RAM disk, and then get it swapped to the internal drive? Mayyybe. I’m not sure if Linux will just call that too silly.

The only downside of a core 2 duo is that they run hot.

I concur. Just swapped an HDD for an m.2 SSD on an older i3 machine and it hauls ass running Windows 11/gaming. Very impressed with the i3.

Wow, that's good to hear. I've been so heavily biased against touching any i3 stuff from years of struggling with them.

Plus most Chromebooks are basically fanless and an i3 will more easily avoid running into thermal limits. It's just the right choice for this kind of usage.

>a 12th Gen i3 is not massively far from an M1

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/4746vs4754vs4765vs4104/...

1215U (accounting for the overwhelming majority of "12th gen i3" laptops) is about 75% of the performance of the lowest-tier M1, so I suppose that's in the ballpark.

Performance-per-watt is still night and day, though, with both i3 laptop chips ranging from 15W base to 55W turbo, and M1 ranging from 7W to <30W.

75% of an M1 is pretty damn good as when the M1 first came out it was the fastest laptop single core performance in the world.

> It feels a little weird and sad that an i3 is the bar to make something "plus" in performance.

Compared to the Celerons found on some Chromebooks, it still counts.

…but there were already plenty of i3 (or even i5, or even R7) Chromebooks with 8 or 16 GB RAM on the market, even at the price point. I don't know what the news is supposed to be here.

The news is that those models with an i3+ and 8GB of ram will be branded differently to 'help inform the customer of enhanced performance and abilities'. They are trying to shed the image of all chromebooks being thought of by the $159 one that the school gave their kid.

Indeed, I’m reading the comments on this post because my only experience of Chromebooks is with the cart of them that my students use at school. And that experience has been such a wonderful one that I literally threw one into the trashcan in frustration one day trying to get it to work.

The price point of the i3 ~100 dollars, and the fact that most applications will not be CPU bound by an i3 are the driving factors. The clock speed is one thing, but the instruction sets really provide everything that's needed that would otherwise peg your cpu (notably quick sync, but also aesni, avx2.) It's a testament to bad software (minus games) if the thing you're running can't be handled by an i3 with ease.

>The price point of the i3 ~100 dollars

Where? The article mentions $399.

They mean the CPU itself, not the whole laptop.

Sorry, from the context I understood "the i3 model"

12th gen i3 is more than enough for typical chromebook workloads. This thing will fly for every day tasks that you'd do on a chromebook or cheap computer (browser, learning to code, emulators)

Yeah, not to mention that RAM. You are going to be using this likely to run multiple heavy-duty webapps, and Chrome will chew RAM in that scenario.

"i3" (or for that matter, "i5", "i7"...) means nothing in terms of performance. The generation matters a lot.

For example an i3-12100 is faster than a i7-9700F

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-12100... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-9700F...

Yup. And pre-8th gen most consumer i5/i7 laptops were basically dual-core i3's.

> It feels a little weird and sad that an i3 is the bar to make something "plus" in performance

It doesn't seem that far from an apple m1 in benchmark I can find for the i3 12100 which is the low tier of i3s

Meh, still the same software. Still the same screen reader that's not gotten a substantial update in like 3 or so years, and even on my Acer Spin 713 with 16 GB RAM, even Emacs, Emacspeak, and IBM TTS under Crostini is more responsive than local Google TTS models. So nah I'm just not the target audience. At least Orca can run properly on Crostini, unlike WSL, and Linux windows don't just... vanish when plugging in my dock connected to a monitor and Ethernet. But not even Crostini makes me want to pull out the Chromebook, ever. I update the thing, look in ChromeVox options and what's new page to see if anything has improved, and then put it away. It's a great piece of hardware, a high end model, just with very lackluster accessibility.

Announced or cancelled? It's 50:50 if you don't put it in title.

Don't know about the product but the ad tune is definitely a banger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfOx8BBICfY

All I heard sadly was "this ain't for you, old man."

Bought a Chromebook to use as a webcam machine for meetings. Thing was fucking useless. We just used an old Macbook instead. Same price point.

It could be that I'm the wrong audience for this but I can't help but feel this is massively disappointing even for budget options. The minimum criteria is no way acceptable for 2023, especially given there's a lot of development happening around LLMs that can be run on-device. Given the current state of AI, I feel like the baseline specs is all the more important for general consumers also to play with these and to interface with them.

Then again, Google's (and Microsoft's) vision is all about locking access behind their cloud empires.

I think the idea of Chromebooks are great, unfortunately it is made by the dystopian surveillance company Google and therefore cannot be trusted. I don't really want AI capabilities that sends my data back to the mothership embedded in my operating system either.

Otherwise it would be a great laptop experience but I would never buy one for me or my family and I strongly advice people not to buy one either.

The sad part is that people do not realize what data companies like Google holds on them and many would be freaked out if they knew.

I think most people know but don't care. Their search history, photos, and email are knowingly stored by Google, but it doesn't impact them.

You would need a rogue employee or a massive breach to make people care, I think.

Fedora Silverblue is in some ways comparable. Unfortunately it uses Flatpaks.

In the end, the architecture and security (against non-Google adversaries) of ChromeOS trumps everything else for my personal use. And when maintaining things for nontechnical family, ChromeOS eliminates large classes of problems that everything else has.

What is the alternative to flatpaks for something like silverblue?

I don't know of anything. I think you could create something pretty solid using Nix, but no one (afaik) has put the effort into making a simple, user friendly OS built on it.

..or go a step further and just use nixOS :)

I mean, you could probably put together something that used snaps instead.

What don't you like about Flatpaks?

>I don't really want AI capabilities that sends my data back to the mothership embedded in my operating system either.

Okay but does this actually happen ever?

If you are using Google or Google maps and they mention there is a 711, yeah your location is known.

However, I've been avoiding google search since chatgpt, and outside of a few programming searches, google has no idea what I'm doing. Or at least their ads aren't particularly targeted outside the few programming searches. Haven't really been enticed by the 'learn python' ads in the screen I never visit.

Can't we also look at the source code? I have been happy with my degoogled products that are open source. That can be trusted. Black boxes cannot be trusted.

Chrome and Chromebook are proprietary, closed source products, built on top of open source code. They are black boxes. Black boxes Google just added literal spyware to this past month.

The whole "Google platforms are open source" myth is one of the most ridiculous lies they've managed to sell people on.

If you're okay with Windows 11 you gotta be okay with ChromeOS too.

And you don't have to use any of the Google services, you can install Libreoffice, Thunderbird, etc. just fine in the Crostini Linux environment.

There are options beyond Chrome OS and Windows, and I'd say that almost all of them offer better privacy protections.

I'm not okay with Windows 11.

Interesting product but it's a shame that Chromebooks typically just turn into e-waste after 2-3 years due to lack of support from Google. They're cheap but terrible for the environment.

Wrong, Chromebooks receive 10 years of updates from the date of release. So check out the release date before buying one.

that is correct, but this is a new policy, announced only in mid-September 2023[1]

[1] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/automatic...

And the previous policy was 7 years for most models. The original poster was still blatantly lying.

7 years from initial launch, not from end of sale, so it was quite possible to buy a Chromebook and then have it promptly lose support

Let's also note that Google now offers ChromeOS Flex[1], which is a version of ChromsOS comparable to Debian "old stable".

I have ChromeOS Flex running on two older (but excellent) Chromebooks used by family. The hardware is good; the chipset was obsoleted by Intel. ChromeOS Flex is keeping these devices useful without my needing to install Debian. (Less work for me.)

[1] _ https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11542901?hl=e...

Support for Chromebooks is excellent. I've had my Chromebook for 4 years with zero issues getting patches/ updates.

Why can’t companies be honest with themselves. Nobody wants underpowered x86 laptops running a glorified thin client OS.

My mom actually really likes her Chromebook Pixel and I'm not sure what to replace it with now that it isn't supported.

For a lot of users the browser is the whole computer anyway. Windows is now full of ads and User Engagement popups.

It's tough to find an Apple-hardware-level device in the Chromebook space though. There are a few, but this new Chromebook Plus spec seems more like a bare minimum than a premium segment.

I'm using an old 11" Asus on my current trip but it's out of support and I probably won't use it again. With no more Google hardware which a liquid spill killed, not sure what I'll do for travel going forward. <aybe my 13 yo MacBook Pro going forward for a while while I keep a newer MacBook mostly at home. Maybe an Air at some point. Probably not worth another Chromebook at this point even if it's cheap.

Does your 13 yo MBP have the horrid GPU in it? Can't remember the year they started, but my 2011 MBP had one. My cheap ass would probably still be using it if it didn't freeze every time a GPU request was made, which is everything now. Once the browsers wanted GPU acceleration, the thing was unusuable

I think my old MBP is a 2015. In any case, it works fine tor mostly browser-stuff which is all I really use it for on my dining room rable day to day. So more like 8 years old. My 2010's battery swelled and it wasn't worth fixing at that point after I personally did a couple other upgrades to it.

They could do something like:

Chromebook

Chromebook Plus

Chromebook Ultra

Although I can’t really see why you’d need a tricked out Chromebook. Maybe when WebGPU / WebAssembly gains widespread adoption?

I don't really care about having better specs other than a decent processor and SSD. iPad-level performance is fine. ARM is probably the better choice here.

But having a nice keyboard, trackpad, and high res display are good. A lot of Chromebooks really cheap out on the display, even the Chromebook Plus spec only calls for 1080p.

A nice premium-feeling durable computing product covers a lot more than just the raw cpu/gpu speed.

That's really what the original Chromebook Pixel was. Great build quality, high res display, good keyboard/trackpad, and just enough horsepower to run ChromeOS.

The fact that Chromebooks sell seems to indicate that you are mistaken.

ChromeOS is surprisingly solid, between the Android and Linux support you can run basically anything short of heavy desktop games on it.

For all the Chrome memes, ChromeOS's desktop environment is really snappy (even on a passively cooled dualcore throttling down to 500MHz) and uses up basically no RAM (once you dig into the terminal and top, and realize the task manager reports cache as used… sigh).

Google is the king of killing unprofitable businesses yet Chromebooks live.

Are Chromebooks not profitable? They seem to have done a great job with the education sector.

That's my point, they live because they're most likely profitable.

Got it - I misunderstood.

I think that's their point - if Chromebooks were unprofitable, they would have been killed off years ago. Instead, they're thriving and being expanded upon.

new nodes for data mining

It's not a thin client. Hasn't been for a long while. Has Android and Linux layers which runs apps / programs locally and offline. There's also several web apps that can be run offline, including Google's own. Certain models have Steam support. Chrome OS devices are closer to being general purpose computing devices than iPads.

You could run one as a thin client and have a great time with it. But it's no longer limited to being thin.

Anyone remember when Chromebooks were these really fast lightweight cheap systems? I used to be a huge fan of Chromebooks back then. Not anymore.

Chromebooks went off the deep end when they told you and promised you that you would get these computers which could run linux apps and android apps. The idea was great: "Run web apps, mobile apps, and desktop apps, all on a secure throwaway system." The performance of doing that was abysmal on weak laptops. It used lots of memory. It started off very slowly when the Linux VM and Android VMs booted. And slowed down the browser too. Chromebook Co should have followed the Windows/Apple way: release those VMs only on certified premium/plus notebooks.

I don't understand your problem, the Linux VM isn't even enabled by default and Android can be disabled with 2 clicks in the settings.

The chromebook website lists specific laptops that support android/linux VMs. I bought a laptop based on that list, but they were not usable in reality. It slowed down the computer significantly.

All new Chromebooks support android and linux. I guess you looked at this[1] list? That basically listed the first Chromebooks that got support for it. Doesn't necessarily mean its recommended to run it on these.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chrome-os-systems-suppo...

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