Why are Chromebooks still a thing?

Before I graduated I worked in the electronics dept of a supermarket chain and we had Samsung series 3 chromebooks -flying- off the shelf at £229, and for good reason. Their target market is non-tech-savvy teenagers and university students who only ever use/need to use SaaS (but don't know it). They want something stylish but functional. If somebody in that market asks you to demonstrate it, they will buy it over 90% of the time in my experience (granted, not a particularly scientific trial, but there you have it.)

Why? Three main reasons.

(i) Price - the next cheapest laptop will tend to start at 279, 299, and it will have some crappy Celeron chip in it. You can start looking at paying 120 more for something with even slightly comparable speed. Then MS office costs at least 79 quid, and that's only for a year's subscription. 120 quid if you want a permanent activation. Then you will probably be pushed to sell them Norton AV for 25 quid also (due to my strong moral principles(!) I never actually pushed this sale - the store I worked at were probably quite happy to see the back of me)

(ii) Ease of use - Google docs + Drive offline is an excellent product, you can do just about anything that the casual education or light productivity user will really easy. No confusing ribbon interface or being overloaded with options.

(iii) Quality - supported by a known brand (Samsung), with fast flash memory, a fast ARM processor and a nice anti-glare IPS display. You will get none of those things in any of the Windows models we sold (all under £500, granted)

The author of the article, Gabe Knuth, is a full-time tech pro with 12 years experience in application virtualisation on MS and Citrix platforms, according to his profile on the site. So he will find absolutely nothing for him on a Chromebook unless he is a heavy tablet user who desperately misses the keyboard. He is -obviously- not in the target market. But not being able to even -imagine- the target market is just silliness, because the Chromebook is a good product.

Argh. I have no idea how stuff like this makes it up on Hacker News.

> The Chromebook Pixel came out earlier this year, and while it certainly addressed the subpar hardware, it came with a price tag that was more than the cost of my MacBook Air despite having much less of just about everything but screen resolution.

First, the screen resolution is exceptionally better. More than that though the Pixel beats or matches a MacBook Air in all but two categories: battery life & local storage space. You'll note that Apple sells MBP's, which currently are actually sub-par to the Air in several ways, but are better in terms of display and CPU and they charge... way more than the Pixel. On top of that, the Pixel has a touch screen. Check out pricing on touchscreen laptops that even remotely match the Pixel...

Honestly, anyone I know who got a Pixel loves it, including Linus Torvalds.

On the larger matter of Chromebooks in general, it's all about the user experience (which is ironic given his criticism). I think obviously in his case, he doesn't get it, but having such a nice integrated set of web services is a huge win for a lot of people.

Chromebooks aren't as well suited for general purpose use as traditional laptops and they certainly aren't for everyone, but they actually are quite nice for a lot of people.

We live in a bubble. Among my friends Mac has 90% computer marketshare and the iPhone has probably 75%. But we know empirically that outside of the high-tech fat-wallet echo chamber these numbers are completely different.

I imagine that is where the Chromebooks are going as well: outside of the bubble. We know people are buying them since they are always in the top-selling laptops category on Amazon.

Chromebooks are brilliant, they're just not for you.

An awful lot of people just need a browser. They don't want a computer, they just want an internet appliance. If you're one of those people, a Chromebook is so obviously, self-evidently the best device that any debate over the matter seems ludicrous. No viruses, no mysterious slowdowns, no annoying things that pop-up in the bottom right corner, no inexplicable pauses when the damned thing refuses to shut down (Windows updates). The Damned Thing Just Works.

For my grandmother, a popup window from her antivirus asking to install an update is a complete showstopper, because the dialog is written in jargon she doesn't understand and because she doesn't have the confidence to take a guess at the right action. For her, a Chromebook is a wonder machine.

OP's argument appears to be a variant of the old "Macs are overpriced, I could build a computer with similar specs for far less" trope. Macs and Chromebooks have virtues that are non-obvious to people within the tech community, who have taken for granted the vices of Windows or Linux running on typical commodity hardware.

> I'd like to meet the end user that is 100% happy with their Chromebook and uses it for everything they do without having access to a more traditional computer.

I don't think that is the only reason people are [apparently] buying Chromebooks. My brother just got one for his birthday as a secondary laptop for school. He has a laptop already, but it is a beefy gaming one that isn't really conducive to carrying to and from campus. So for $200 (much easier to stomach than $500 for a Windows tablet) he's got a super lightweight machine that he can use to browse the web (wifi is everywhere on campus), listen to spotify/watch netflix between classes, and look up his assignments. Can it run Office or SolidWorks? No, but that is not the point - it has great battery life and is a snappy internet terminal that you can throw in your backpack.

Why are Kindles still a thing? Why not just get an iPad mini to read on?

This is pretty typical arrogance you see from some tech people.

They can't comprehend that something they don't use can be useful to other people.

Is it quite possible that the author is not the target market for Chromebooks?

I have a couple of friends who own them and are very happy. For older people who really just need an 'internet machine', they are ideal.

I am tempted to buy one for myself, I am tempted by a laptop which is cheap, light, and has amazing battery life. My standard laptop is the T420s, which is a great machine but is very heavy and only gets about 90 minutes battery life. I get tired of carrying it around.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want to type more than a sentence or so on a tablet or phone.

An HP Chromebook 14" is more powerful than, say, a 2008 Macbook Pro.

Its possible (soon) to flush the bios of this thing and thus turn it into a commodity PC and install a lightweight Linux or whatever you want. So it will boot in 5 seconds into X and have almost 10 hours of battery life.

4GB is plenty for your browser, Vim, VLC, and irssi. The keyboard is decent. It doesn't feel as nice as a Macbook Air but it is literally 1/4th the price and IT WILL TAKE A SIM CARD.

Frankly, I'm considering using it as my sole device. Think about it;

Using an iPad as a thin client was a Moby Dick type dream in some nerd circles for a while - but now finally inexpensive hardware has reached double digit battery life and cellular connectivity.

I loved my CR-48 so much I'm thinking of getting another (it got lost in an accident). It was light and pleasant to type on for long periods. Tablets are superior in many respects but if you do a lot of typing then you probably don't want all the weight in the screen, and you'd like a decent keyboard.

   both speak about it in what is best described as a "not negative" way

As opposed to Win8, which was quite sincerely negative, and costs you the consumer money.

The OS can die and disappear. And ChromeOS is a waypoint along that road, helping the desktop vanish out from under us. Most consumers are happy running web browsers 80% of the time and nothing else. The remaining 20% is stretching itself harder and harder to justify it's existence apart from the common platforms every-day.

iOS and Android are a little different a scenario, and I don't begrudge that. But the desktop platform's relevance has vanished. ChromeOS heralds that in.

The author clearly has not made any attempt to live with a Chromebook. Certainly not all apps are offline capable, but increasingly so they are, and particularly the vital ones that you'd need to do normal desktop type work.

Certainly some people DO need real applications and do need the OS they've always known so they can run the enterprise apps they need to run. But this is old guard, legacy stuff, and the new world is happy emerging without that baggage. Good riddance, I'm glad we get to dumb this guys old guard view at the door and start fresh without.

Every time I read that some well-meaning company has pushed Windows machines into a school or village in a developing country, I recoil, knowing that each machine is a liability as well as an asset. I know how much effort goes into supporting friends and family. Computers are too complex.

Chromebook represents a "good enough" solution for places that don't need desktop apps but would like connectivity. But that's not the feature. The feature is all the other stuff you don't have to do anymore. No more virus trouble. No more registry.

They're not cheap enough yet, but they represent a better solution than the next 5 generations of ever-increasing complexity that is Windows. And no, common-or-garden Linux isn't the solution here either.

My mom (a teacher) LOVES her Chromebook. It's easy to use, difficult to "break", and great for the times when she needs to type a lot.

I know a few schools in my area are buying these for internet research and word processing. They are cheap and do the job.

I've considered buying one as a secondary device. For instance, I stayed a week on a beach last summer and didn't feel comfortable bringing my $1,800 primary laptop to a cabin 50 ft. from the ocean which I would use (and keep an eye on) only a few times. I ended up bringing my tablet though, and that seemed to suffice that need - but if I was a writer or something like that I would have preferred a larger screen and keyboard and a Chromebook would be perfect for that.

I have loved and used my purchased pixel since it came out. It has only gotten better since the first day I got it. I also recall that Linus and is/was a fan. From a dev perspective i can only fault it for not allowing me a vms hn crouton mode. My co workers also enjoy the less expensive versions and use them as on the go dev boxes.

Basically i've come to understand chromebooks as another linux distro; maintained by google, updated very frequently and focussed on browsing.

Why is font-size: 90%; still a thing?

Because simplicity counts for something. If a family member wants a new laptop for under $300, I'm not going to subject them to Windows 8. Neither of us care that the Windows machine ticks more boxes. Many people will enjoy a Chromebook far more. I know I do. The minute a family member gets a Chromebook is the minute I stop getting support requests.

I just bought one and use it quite a bit. Of course I immediately installed crouton so really it's a $200 linux laptop.

A lot of people I know are buying Chromebooks, and are pretty happy with them. In the comments section of the article, several readers state that schools are buying these up by the boatload. Not every product on the market is aimed at the web professional, who is going to reach for an Apple by default.

I use the Samsung chromebook for writing / browsing / mail / fb / movies; I find it so much more pleasant than a tablet. And I switch on crouton if I want to do development or run emulators (my favorite ones run fine on it which allows me to play games). Besides actually building / publishing apps, I hardly touch my MBP anymore. I don't see why the plastic etc is a problem; it's nice and light, cheap (almost impulse) and it can run almost everything I want/need.

Even if crouton did not exist, I would use it for browsing/writing over a tablet or a heavier, more expensive computer.

my brother got a chromebook pixel at Google IO this year and i have to say it's a beautiful piece of tech...if the OS was a bit more mature (more apps and functionality), i could easily replace my laptop with a chromebook.

I only know one guy in my personal bubble using one. He's a front end web developer and does much of his coding with ShiftEdit and is able to consume stuff, code on sites and exchange email with it. He loves it.

Personally I wouldn't be able to use such a device for everything, and I don't think most people could either. The traditional "media consumers" could use it, but I think they're just as content doing it with a phone or ipad.

For me personally, the appeal of Chromebooks is that web apps are put on a level playing field as all other apps. This means that I have complete control over the apps I use. I can run all of them on my own server, I can outsource to a provider I pay money to (like email), or I can use a free-option with a catch. I have that choice. Which is something that's not true of other desktop operating systems.

They're catching on a fair bit in education -- they're fairly cheap and they do what students need for a lot less than stock standard Windows PCs that got ordered for years. For any more intensive computer user they could never be your "main machine" but I can imagine them having a use.

But others have said, they're hardly for the Hacker News crowd.

I love my chromebook. Sure, I can't do any serious development or anything on it unless I'm using something like PythonAnywhere, but if I want to hop around Google Analytics, Hacker News or Youtube, the chromebook is awesome.

My wife has been using the one that I received as a gift on Google I/O 2011 and she is very happy with it, she doesn't need any more

well i am using my arm chromebook recently its perfect to me

first , its cheap, only 245USD, or about 2k chinese yuan secondary, its battary life time is longer than my roommate's mba(used for 1 year) third, with the help of crouton, i can now developing on this machine even without network.

you need to know there're many people live in low profit environment

Can I load local pdf files onto the Chromebook and read them?

> Seriously…who uses these things?

Google employees, sometimes. Think that's about it.