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Comment by Wilya | Hacker News Reader

If you categorize all desktop apps ever made as "legacy", sure, it's hard to see why people wouldn't use a Chromebook.

On the other hand, non-technical users are happily torrenting shows and movies, playing 3D-intensive games on Steam, making somewhat decent-looking documents with Word, making gifs with a pirate copy of Photoshop, etc.

A Chromebook offers (generally inferior) alternatives for some of these tasks, but not even all of them.

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If your standard is "gifs in photoshop" and "somewhat decent documents in Word" then you clearly haven't seen the web alternatives to "all desktop apps ever made." Saying you need Photoshop to make gifs is like saying you need the US nuclear stockpile for mall security.

I have a Chromebook and regularly use it to write beautiful LaTeX documents, decent documents/spreadsheets in Drive, wonderful charts on plot.ly, on-the-go programming in any language I need, and all photo editing I've ever needed in the browser. They even have javascript torrent apps these days.

When the network connection is available...

That's true, but a lot of new Chromebooks these days ship with "lifetime" 3g or 4g, right?

Still no coverage in many places outside big cities.

I wouldn't call people that torrent shows and movies, pirate copies of Photoshop and play 3D-intensive games on Steam "non-technical users".

That's clearly not the target audience.

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