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Comment by cpncrunch | Hacker News Reader

Chromebooks are just much more useful than ipads in so many ways. I've recently finished getting our html5 web conferencing app working smoothly on chromebooks because pretty much all our educational customers are moving from laptops to chromebooks right now.

I was skeptical about chromebooks, but having owned one myself for the past few months I can now see the benefits, and I would recommend them over Windows laptops to anyone who is not a developer. For all intents and purposes chromebooks are essentially virus-proof and screwup-proof. (I'm sure you could get a virus or screw it up, but you would have to try damn hard!)

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> to anyone who is not a developer.

I think you're forgetting a few categories. Graphics designers. Architects. Gamers. Or basically anyone who needs to use software that hasn't been ported to a web-app (of which there are still many).

...accountants, dentists, medical, automotive, hotel, financial.

You are right on with that, there are still so many. I work in b2b and meet with a lot of business owners and office managers. So many small to medium sized business are dependent (and happy with) on their desktop software systems. iPads are great as nodes in some software cases, but essentially any industry where mass input is required I really don't see desktop / laptops going anywhere.

They're on their way out as well.

On the financial side, I work for a company that destroyed the entire desktop side of things. Within 5 years they destroyed all the competitors just by doing it all on the web and cutting admin and management costs.

With respect to hotels/booking systems, I'm tackling that one myself. All the software already out there is crap.

All the markets above apart from possibly medical are ripe for the taking.

"On the financial side, I work for a company that destroyed the entire desktop side of things."

How does the disaster recovery plan cover complete loss of Internet connection or corruption of remote data?

Genuinely interested.

This is always the biggest concern. The smaller firms use 3G based connections anyway as they're mostly on the road. The mid size guys have ADSL and 3G back up. The big guys use leased lines with SLAs.

We have 3 fully redundant data centres and a separate archival site. Its cheaper to pay us for the redundancy than fuck it up themselves. Their data is better in our hands as we centralise their DR strategy. Previously their stuff was stored in infected windows laptops with no backups and at best tapes being taken home by staff (unencrypted). They can access it all and export at will too.

What happens if you go bankrupt?

(I once asked that question of a salesperson flogging eportfolios - student work for portfolio based qualifications stored entirely on their servers. There was no answer)

Source escrow - we release it to clients if we go bankrupt, all data is freely exportable and best of all we're rolling in cash so going bankrupt is going to require some seriously hard work.

We're trying not to be that bastard enterprise company if you know what I mean :)

Perhaps, though I have my doubts for many of them in the short term. Especially gaming: I'm a big fan of what Canvas and WebGL are doing and where things are going, but we're still not there.

Regardless, the parent comment was talking about buying Chromebooks today, and today there are still many people and companies that rely on desktop only software.

the software out there might be crap, but I can tell you it is not going to be replaced on an enterprise level with tablet devices. you are definitely right there are a ton of industries that are going to be totally shut out by what is going on but until then I don't see graphic designers and dozens of other industries using tablets to do their job.

I'm not talking about tablets. Tablets are a passing fad. They don't work well for productivity. They work reasonably well for phones and that is about it.

Enterprise is going to be Chromebook like devices.

I'm with you on that all the way. I don't see very many people lugging around computers with massive power supplys and complex raid arrays when most data lives on a cloud platform and most modern b2b apps aren't starving for RAM the way they used to.

... or anybody who doesn't think it's a good idea to rely on Google's future good-will to maintain a useful device, privacy concerns aside.

Yes, you're correct.

Unless you develop specifically with Microsoft technologies, Chromebooks can easily be used by developers as well. You can easily dual boot or run crouton[0].

[0]: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

This! I have 3 croutonized chromebooks, and as of yesterday one HP chromebox. Takes no time to do it.

All running now debian/sid in chroot.

You want scratch?

"sudo apt-get install scratch". Then have some fun!

Or maybe frogatto, or emacs, or QtCreator, or tons of good free software out there...

for half, or even quarter the price of iPad.

Isn't a Chromebook just limited to web browsing? iPads can do that and more, right?

I've never used one so I can't attest to their efficacy in practice, but there are plenty of apps available that will work offline: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/collection/offli...

Also, many people I know with $1000+ MacBooks use them for almost nothing but web browsing.

Inside Google, MacBooks are essentially used as Chromebooks with aluminium cases ;)

If you feel like getting a tad nerdy, you can run other Linux distros alongside ChromeOS. They make nice dev books.

Sent from my Acer C720 running Elementary OS.

The problem is the browser on the iPad is nearly useless for anything but the most casual of browsing due to memory constraints on the device and the lack of virtual memory/swap.

I often run into situations where I literally cannot have just 2 tabs open in Safari and switch between them without losing everything I've typed into text fields since it runs out of memory and dumps the other tab.

What are you doing?

I bought an iPad 2 on release, and still use it to this day. I've literally never run into the problem that you describe, and for a few months I did all of my work on it.

Nope! There is crouton, and other solutions, or full blown linux running from SD-card or from the device itself. It's very open.

> I would recommend them over Windows laptops to anyone who is not a developer.

Really? Would you recommend it to your (hypothetical) 17 year old sister about to enter college, or 85 year old grandpa? Asking because I've never used a Chromebook, and this thread has made me very curious about them.

For the 85 year old grandpa, absolutely. I have an uncle (around 85) who went through multiple computers (edit: all Windows), and kept getting virus and other malware; he kept falling for sites that would advertise to "clean" his computer, and it just kept getting worse and worse as a result. The instant he switched to a ChromeOS-device, that all went away, and my tech-support burden also went away instantly.

His biggest issues with ChromeOS is printing (his printer of the time was not compatible with Google's cloud printing service), but after he bought a new printer that basically went away too.

> he kept falling for sites that would advertise to "clean" his computer

If they need Windows for some reason, AdBlock is a big help with this.

I got one for my 25 year old brother (history teacher) as a replacement for his old Macbook. All he does is watch YouTube, browse Facebook, listen to Pandora, check his email, and use Google Drive.

He loves the device (an Acer C720) and his only complaint is that he can't run Skype. He switched to Hangouts.

For the average user I recommend Chromebooks without question unless they need Microsoft Office.

Skype is a pretty big dealbreaker for my grandparents, though. All of their elderly friends are on Skype and many have no idea what Hangouts (or Google Plus) are.

Can't even run Skype? That's a massive failure.

Hangouts is a deal-breaker for those who don't want the integration and privacy costs that come along with data from search, chats and email all integrated through a single provider. On top of that, hangouts doesn't even work in some parts of the world.

So, Hangouts are a privacy cost, but Skype is acceptable? Have you ever paid attention to Skype's track record?

grandparent refers to the risk of having all your stuff available to the same provider, so skype's track record is not all there is to it.

What do you mean, "privacy costs"? Hangouts by Google, Skype by Microsoft. Either way, NSA has direct access.

Remember, there's even an online MS Office now...

I bought Chromebook for my Dad who is 66 (who never used computer before) and my daughter who is 8. Both have been using chromebook regularly with little to no help from anyone else.

Fair warning. Chromebooks don't support Java browser plugins (arguably a plus) and some big colleges still need them for their student websites. Something that you'd want to check out first.

I gave my 61 yr-old Mom a Chromebook.

Gets the job done for her and pretty happy with it.

Mind if I ask which model? I had a chromebook 3 years ago and found it too slow to do anything beyond basic usage, and especially not software development. I have however heard good things about the Pixel.

Mine is an Acer C720 (I got that because it's what most of the schools were using). It's fast enough for anything I've used it for (web browsing, web conferencing + ssh client). Takes literally 6 seconds to boot up (or 1 second to wake from sleep). It seems a lot less sluggish than my 2-year old MacBook Pro - I think the SSD helps a lot.

This appears to be the older ARM ones. The newer Intel ones are pretty nippy even with the Celeron badge.

As a gamer, I don't want to have to download gigabytes of stuff from the cloud every time I want to play a AAA title.

Steam supports some of the games, and with SD Card you can make your ~/.steam folder there, games would be on your SD Card.

gog.com also has 9-10 games running, and apart from that many more games are running on the croutonized chromebook.

This with debian/sid and chromebook in dev-build.

You won't be playing AAA games on chromebooks anyway...

The parent specified recommending to anyone who isn't a developer. I'm just pointing out a use-case that has been forgotten.

The implication was the typical user. Artists using Photoshop, producers using Ableton, engineers using AutoCAD etc.. were all left out as well.

I'm surprised at how much downmodding my comment is getting. Frankly, it really goes to show just how much of a bubble HN is in if people don't see 'gaming' as being something a 'typical user' does. Gaming is a huge market, full of non-technical users, and Windows is a strong market segment.

I mean, seriously, you've just likened gamers to being as rare as AutoCAD users.

You're reading too much into this, I was just throwing up other examples of other minority use cases.

But, if we assume using Steam (arbitrary) as the benchmark for being somewhat serious about gaming, then there are 75 million[0] computer gamers. Compare that to the number of Windows users[1] at 1.5 billion and they are a definite minority outside the realm of a 'typical computer user'.

And if I had to guess and why your comment is being down voted, it's probably because it comes across as a bit nitpicky as gaming very obviously isn't the focus of a Chromebook.

[0] - http://www.joystiq.com/2014/01/15/steam-has-75-million-activ...

[1] - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/bythenumbers/index.html

The original comment was 'recommend a chromebook for any windows user who isn't a developer'. It's hardly nitpicky to say that there are plenty of people who have a use case that this doesn't fit (business software users are another very large segment). Oh, well, if it's 'only' 75 million people, I guess they don't count - they're not true Scotsmen.

I live close to the rustbelt - far far away from the tech "bubble" and I can happily tell you that barring the undergrad kids at the university I have rarely seen a person use his/her laptop for gaming. So no, gamers are not "typical users" in my mind either.

This.

In the UK I don't see anyone much bar some specialists playing games on PCs. It's done on xboxes and phones these days.

Even I as an ex-gaming, clan membered top 20 ngworldstats unreal tournament player who attended many a LAN party doesn't play a single game on a PC now and doesn't own a graphics card past an integrated Intel one...

Ah, the good old "there is no PC gaming anymore" argument, when PC gaming is still vibrant. As sehr links above, there are 75 million active Steam users, and Steam is not console-focused. Yet another No True Scotsman argument.

Edit: Numbers from a year ago show that Steam active users (65M) is higher than XBox Live users (48M), and while XBoxes aren't the only console, it's clearly just not true that 'gaming is [only] being done on xboxes these days', no matter how many leaderboards you were on back in the day.

http://www.slashgear.com/steam-users-eclipse-xbox-live-psn-s... (october last year)

Then why say "anyone but a developer"? The wording doesn't make sense if this usage of "everyone" means "everyone but designers, music producers, engineers, etc."

Actually, with html5, emscripten and webgl I don't think it will be long before the web is the primary platform for games.

Chromebooks have hard disks (or more usually SSDs) so they can cache that data.

Also, would it not make more sense to automatically download parts of that 10GB of game data if/when you actually need it, rather than leaving it sitting on your hard disk? With today's broadband speeds that shouldn't be a problem.

Even for developers there is 'developer mode', or you can install a different Linux.

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