I wanted to make the cheapest possible development machine I could, assuming I did all my work on a remote server. So I bought a Lenovo 100s for $80 from Amazon (ok, it was $160, but I signed up for the Amazon credit card for the discount). It's one of the lowest end chromebooks you can get.
But it's awesome. The google docs/sheets/etc features are nice, and it's perfectly capable of web browsing. For development, if you work in the cloud, using Vim on a remote server, all you need is an SSH client.
For fun, I put Kali linux onto an SD card and I can use crouton to switch to the Kali chroot. So I can literally plug in an SD card and have a totally fresh "development machine" for $80.
It's great for traveling in developing countries because if it gets stolen, I'm out $80, not $1500.
Is there really any other use case for a chromebook given how cheap a decently-spec'd laptop is these days? I'm confused as to HPs strategy of making an upscale chromebook - who is the target market?
Home users aren't the target audience which is some of the confusion. And probably not developers either even if the capabilities suit many web/linux types. There likely aren't enough to make serious money.
People mainly see chromebooks in retail and think of them as cheap gifts for the grandparents so they don't have to do computer support and that is missing the bigger picture. What they may not have seen is the truck loads of chromebooks being sold to schools where low maintenance and security are as valuable as the price.
The high end Chromebooks for Work are part of a push into the enterprise market.
Chromebooks have a decent security model. The storage is encrypted. The os is signed. The system processes run in jails where possible and the browser processes are sandboxed. You don't have to worry about someone picking up some media on the street and plugging it in and installing a keylogger.
Combine that with extreme portability and low maintenance costs and if you are the sort of org that can move a lot of things to the cloud or remote sessions then there is likely a business case for them. I guess we will have to wait and see.
Back in 2014 there were stories that Woolworths, the biggest Australian retailer, was rolling out 8000 Chrome OS devices. That is the sort of market these higher spec devices will be targeting.
Maintenance. Why maintain a copy of Windows when all you use is the web? Antivirus, security, app and driver updates, bloatware shipped preinstalled, etc. Here you just pull it out of the box, log in, and it's good to go until the battery or other hardware wear out.
Well, that's fine for nontechnical users, but nontechnical users aren't buying high-end laptops anyway. High-end ($800+) laptops are bought by developers, sysadmins, or other people who need real native applications, which precludes Chromebooks. So these machines are in a weird market segment where they're too expensive for the vast majority of Chromebook buyers, but not capable enough to steal marketshare from, e.g. Thinkpads and Macbooks.
For what anecdata's worth, I see a huge number of non-technical people who buy high-end laptops (specifically Macs), and as far as I can tell, it maps fairly well to the individual's socioeconomic status. Everyone from baby-boomer parents to social workers. It's why you see so many Macs and iPhones as product placement ads within shows whose target markets dwarf the techie population:
Yes, but I think a non-technical person who buys a $1000 macbook is extremely unlikely to buy a $1000 chromebook. The main appeal is obviously the brand and colours(my sister wants a new macbook purely because there is a rose gold one, she doesn't care about specs). A Chromebook is no different(in their eyes) from a $200 Acer - it's a "non-apple" laptop so it doesn't matter how well made it is or how great it performs.
My argument is that developers do not need high end notebooks. Unless your development work requires specialized hardware (e.g. iOS development requires a Mac), there is little need to develop locally. Most of the time, you're targeting servers anyway. Why not develop on a server too? Also, when you start a new project, you can pick a cloud development box that matches exactly the specs you want, whereas you're still stuck with the same laptop from project to project. So in that sense, cloud development offers more flexibility than local development. And it saves you money on expensive laptops!
There's also the self-satisfaction of knowing you can code anything with any $100 laptop and an Internet connection.
I use a Chromebook as my main dev machine these days. It is wonderful to finally have a fanless laptop, a 15 hour battery life and masses under 1kg. Except I nuked ChromeOS for real Linux and carry a few gigs of documentation to make internet optional.
Some devs get it and see how it could work. They mostly get hung up on the keyboard, the lack of home/end/pgup/pgdn. (Readline keybinds are my best friend now.) Other devs are flabergasted that you can do anything of value on a machine without at least 16GB ram and multiple monitors.
That's fine if you're coding without an IDE and if you can tolerate low-resolution screen. I used your extremely tolerant of such things, but now I'm 30 and thus a senior citizen in the tech world. I need my creature comforts.
One can turn off e.g. EC2 instances when one isn't using them, and even the nano/micro instances are perfectly capable for most dev tasks, so "accounting" for this cost might be a waste of time.
If I'm using a nano or micro, I might as well code directly on the Chromebook, which at least has 2GB of RAM. The point of using a cloud box, from what I understood it, was avoiding the need for an expensive/powerful laptop, and for that you need at least a t2.medium, in my opinion.
You're incredulous that some software stacks might need more than 2GB of RAM to run?
In any case, those 40c/day come to ~$130 extra/year, with which I instead bought a used Thinkpad X220, which comes with a decent CPU, supports 8GB of RAM and weights about the same anyway. I simply don't get Chromebooks.
Well sure there systems requiring any particular resource level. Long before the requirement is 2 GB ram, one might wish to get that on a server if for no other reason than to minimize installation hassles. Clearly, preferences vary.
Do you develop on any particular project 325 days a year? That's hardcore.
Why wouldn't non-technical users buy high end laptops? Even just for a metal casing, better appearance, or performance in day to day use (e.g. gmail), battery life, screen, etc., higher end laptops have plenty of ways to appeal to non-technical users.
A lot of it likely comes down to price sensitivity of the purchaser, which isn't linked to their level of technical skill.
If opening a new credit line and getting a hard hit on your credit report is worth $80, fine. But in absolutely no way was that a product discount. Amazon credited you $80 for opening a credit card with them. All credit cards have rewards. But it had nothing whatsoever to do with the cost of that product.
I agree the 80 dollar discount is irrelevant to the Chromebook but...
Is signing up for a credit card and for your credit report? I would have thought that as long as you pay it off promptly each month it's an overall benefit to your credit score?
Every time you apply for a new card, you get a hard pull. Credit agencies don't like too many hard pulls in a short period of time because it looks reckless to open so many new lines of credit at once.
It's unlikely that opening a new credit card from time to time will do serious damage to your credit. And over the long term, having a lot of credit available can be beneficial to your credit score.
Some employers will even decide who to hire based on their credit score. Bad credit = can't get a job. John Oliver did a bit on the whole credit scoring system scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRrDsbUdY_k
The credit score is used for all sorts of things in the US, from the interest rate on your mortgage to qualifying for renting to even some employment checks. It's fucked up, especially since the formula for calculating the 'score' differs from one agency to another and is deliberately kept obscured.
Yeah that's why I really don't pay attention to it. Plus the fact that it is so easily gamed: if a party wanted to (such as a realtor or someone else with access), they could just run hard credit checks on you all day and tank your score.
To illustrate how fucked it is, I use a credit tracking app from my bank and it consistently reports scores of 700 and above yet I've had realtors tell me they weren't sure if I could get an apartment because of my credit score - showing up with enough cash for the first six months of payments quickly resolved that issue.
It also lowers your average length of account. If you have two cards for 10 years, your average account age is 10 years. If you open another account, that instantly drops down to 7 years.
That is definitely not true all the time. Chase didn't do a hard credit pull to give me my MileagePlus credit card, which was definitely worth the effort. Besides, the hit from a credit pull is only temporary, so unless you are planning on buying property or changing rentals in the short term, it's basically negligible.
People are a bit too worried about their credit scores. Just make sure to not screw up too badly and you should be mostly OK.
Yeah I understand. I monitor my credit obsessively and have a good idea of what happens to my score in any given scenario. In this case I wanted the additional credit line anyway so it was worth it. I'm still young and at the point where any additional line of credit is a long term benefit for me (decreases utilization percentage, increases number of accounts, increases total number of on-time payments, and long term will increase average age of accounts). Also I like the rewards.
Have you found a good SSH client that runs on a chromebook? Every one that I tried has atrocious draw speeds, meaning that if you ran a program that generated pages full of output, the terminal would effectively lock up and become unresponsive for long periods of time.
I'm running in a chroot so installation is just a matter of using the package manager of the "guest" OS (scare quotes because chroot is technically same OS).
I never understood Chromebooks. My used Thinkpad cost about the same (without the discount), it's about the same size and has much better specs, particularly RAM, so I can actually work fine offline.
I used a Chromebook with Crouton before the X220 massively dropped to the same $80-100 OP is talking about. When that happened I bought 3 of them in one deal and some 9 cell batteries; I'm happy as a pig in shit. Using ubuntu/i3wm I get 16+ hours from it consistently and when it's empty I just pop in another battery.
Mostly systems level stuff, but it's not my main dev machine. I used it when I was on vacation and knew I might need to put out fires on remote servers. i.e., I only needed command line access.
Theoretically I can do all my development in vim on a remote server... I think there is zero reason that any development needs to be done locally, unless you're working on an iPhone/android app (in which case a chromebook is useless anyway).
In my ideal world I liberate myself from local development completely, and my computer is just a dumb terminal to my cloud development machine.
But it's awesome. The google docs/sheets/etc features are nice, and it's perfectly capable of web browsing. For development, if you work in the cloud, using Vim on a remote server, all you need is an SSH client.
For fun, I put Kali linux onto an SD card and I can use crouton to switch to the Kali chroot. So I can literally plug in an SD card and have a totally fresh "development machine" for $80.
It's great for traveling in developing countries because if it gets stolen, I'm out $80, not $1500.