I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books."
People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extremely simple spreadsheets. It's way more important to have cheap, reliable, accessible, safe hardware. You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem. The technology is failing them. Wrestling with an operating system sucks.
And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into.
Not really though. What has happened is that the web has come closer to the desktop not the other way around. It's almost the antithesis to desktop Linux. It's like "the only way we could make Linux mainstream is to ignore anything but the core and run everything in a web browser".
In my book a "graphical shell and a widget toolkit" (and its associated ecosystem) is what makes a "desktop" different from e.g. a video game system. ChromeOS wouldn't de facto be very different for users nor applications developers with a windows kernel and windowing system.
Well that's not the Linux Desktop we were referring to all along, to be fair. And the whole ChromeOS stack beyond the kernel is closed-source. Hardly a win for "Linux", unless you assimilate the OS to the Kernel.
It's probably more of a joke than anything. Linus was calling in late 2014 or early 2015 for an ARM-based Linux laptop and he was certainly not referring to ChromeOS.
> we'll actually see a real ARM (well, preferably ARM64) machine one of these days that you can actually develop on, rather than treat just as a development target. The Rasberry PI's, Beagleboards etc are all fun, and all the cellphones and Chromebooks are clearly selling well, but as a developer I feel something is still missing in the market
I don't know why he keeps saying different things on about every occasion.
>I don't know why he keeps saying different things on about every occasion.
Only he doesn't (say different things) here. He's talking about the Chromebook as a computer -- he couldn't care less about the Chromebook concept itself and the underlying OS for himself. But he likes the hardware. He himself runs a Chromebook now (used to have a Macbook Air 2-3 years ago), but with the OS wiped and regular Linux installed.
But when it comes to Linux adoption in general, he sees Chromebooks as a positive development.
Moreover, Chromebooks, when paired with a good cloud IDE like https://c9.io, are excellent for writing code - more so than any "traditional" OS, since the local system is only dedicating resources toward keeping the interface responsive, and not wasting them on background distractions like local search indexing or filesystem defragmentation. Meanwhile, if you accidentally forkbomb a cloud development server, your music player doesn't freeze in an endless sample loop at max volume, and if your battery dies, you don't lose your uncommitted in-buffer file changes. Driver updates never break your system's ability to connect to the network, and (with separate workspaces for separate projects) compilation never breaks due to the installation of a conflicting SDK version.
To be frank, I don't know how most developers can tolerate writing their code on anything else.
If you ever visit developing countries or places like China where internet just sucks you can't realistically use cloud services. Out of interest, I wonder what part of the experience of a cloud service aren't you motivated to replicate on your own system for added speed/security/control/learning?
Most of your arguments seem Windows-oriented (driver updates) or moot with decent CI/CD workflow practices (conflicting SDK versions).
It took me like five minutes to parse what you were asking about "replicating" the cloud experience locally - the way you phrase it, you're inherently assuming that a local development environment would be superior in a few factors, none of which end up being so:
- Speed: Local development environments are just as slow as cloud ones, when not slower (due to compositor hitches, background downloads, heavyweight UI toolkits, all that bullshit). Speed is part of the reason that I ditched local environments.
I can't emphasize enough how little there is to be truly gained from offlining a workspace in terms of performance. When looking beyond pure ideal-world benchmarks and taking the intersecting outliers that impact performance during actual usage into play, the net savings, as I'm trying to convey here, are negative.
- Security: The odds are greater that somebody's going to run a buffer overflow on one of the many undermaintained and/or proprietary services and applications running on your machine (when's the last time someone ran Valgrind against f.lux?) and slipstream a rootkit into it, than that somebody's going to attack your dev server with a zero-day against CentOS (and even if they did, you'd have been just as screwed anyway).
Put another way: which machine is more secure, the one with a dedicated 24/7 threat response team monitoring port access, or the one that gets left unattended on a table at Starbucks every Tuesday afternoon?
- Control: If your development needs more control than root access to the host filesystem, you're doing something wrong, and your codebase is going to be more fragile for it. (Hell, even using root access is a sign that you're being persnickety.)
- Learning: Learning time should be allocated toward the systems involved in what I'm actually building, not a http://www.xkcd.com/1579/ hodgepodge of perpetually-obsolete periphery.
I don't know WTF you're talking about with my examples being Windows-oriented - the driver example I cited was specifically inspired by an issue with my desktop's network adapter on Linux.
If I can try and get to the root of what you're saying: with Chromebook and cloud-based applications, you do not have the resources of one computer, but many and the one closest to you is dedicated ONLY to making sure you have good interactivity.
Web apps can work completely offline if the developer adds support https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/offline/ Not sure why this misconception about web apps requiring "always-on super-stable internet access" persists when this technology has been available for quite some time (in the form of App Cache before Service Workers)
It may be possible to host the ide component locally in the browser, but that doesn't give you the execution environment (ie you can't run a vagrant image or in the case of a server based ide, a container, in a browser)
There is a way to do this actually via https://copy.sh/v86/ Although this is straying from the main point. There are certainly things native apps can do that web apps cannot. But requiring "always-on super-stable internet access" is absolutely not required for web apps. This hasn't been true for at least 5 years now. It also seems to be the most often repeated (completely inaccurate) limitation about web apps. There are certainly limitations. Let's talk about the real limitations, not the mythical ones.
Couldn't agree more. It honestly still seems nuts to me that the browser hasn't taken over the whole OS experience. It's clear that locally installed software is going away. But it's happening on a system that was designed decades ago to request a single markup document, and return it in a single response.
Obviously, the browser has matured. JavaScript has matured. We now have more protocols to work with than just HTTP (SDP for which WebRTC, perfect example. WebSockets). But in my mind the Chromebook is the first step in what is going to become all of personal computing.
Locally installed software is, if anything, more prevalent than ever before.
Let's put aside mobile for a minute that so changed the landscape towards locally installed that it put Google's revenue model on its heels.
You see WhatsApp, Slack, etc., releasing Electron apps just to try to appear locally installable. If there wasn't such a high demand for it, and people weren't clamoring for a stand-alone app instead of a browser tab, companies would never invest the time and money.
The main issue (for example in OS X) is that everything gets subsumed by the browser process so things like Command+Tab don't work as well. There are, of course, also OS integration issues, but over time I think we'll get pretty far along on that front.
> It's clear that locally installed software is going away
Where performance matters, locally installed software is NOT going away anytime soon. Oh, just take gaming, for example. Good luck making AAA games run in your browser.
Not going to cut it for AAA games. Most likely it can be improved significantly with enough work, especially with WebAssembly, but I'll wait until I see it.
Only very small games can be downloaded every time you want to play. Most games have large resources that will need to be cached. But the cache will be large enough that you'll want to surface it to the user, and let them decide what to uninstall, especially on Chromebooks with their puny storage.
Plus games are something you want to be able to play offline.
Would totally cut it for the casual gamer who plays AAA games, though. Not every gamer who purchases the AAA titles is buying hardware to match them. Many times the question boils down to "is my current hardware good enough"?
> And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into.
I see a lot of excitement about WebAssembly. I also see a lot of people saying how java applets were obviously a bad idea, and deserved the obscurity they fell into.
I don't really understand how to reconcile those viewpoints. :/
Web assembly gets first class access to browser API's and the DOM, which Applets never did. Applets had virtually zero ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in. This paired with the fact that most users at the time (on Windows) had to download additional nagware to run them, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Web assembly is a continuation of JavaScript and ASM JS and is poised to be a much better solution for all parties.
Why would they need the ability to communicate with the webpage they were contained in? They can communicate with themselves. What's the difference between a single-page web application in WebAssembly and a single-page java applet in java bytecode? What's the DOM adding? Suppose I want to run Quake in the browser. Applets already do that. It's not a new idea or a new technology.
Well there's a certain consistency to what you can do in a browser. E.g. Opening part of the app in a new tab or searching for things on the page. A soon as you're in flash or an Applet all bets are off. It might work, might not. Its jarring. (Of course this ignores single page apps that deliberately break things like right click, etc.)
> What's the difference between a single-page web application in WebAssembly and a single-page java applet in java bytecode? What's the DOM adding?
With the DOM you don't have to reinvent the numerous wheels it provides (text, images, layout, controls) nor do you have to use the visually inconsistent versions of these applets provided.
Java is also owned by Oracle, and was previously owned by Sun, so its development has/will always be directed by the needs of its owners rather than the community at large.
> Suppose I want to run Quake in the browser. Applets already do that.
I dont think this is the primary motivation for WebAssembly.
> It's not a new idea or a new technology.
Sure, but there are crucial implementation differences (i.e. DOM interaction), differences in the presentation and culture, and political differences.
For one, WebAssembly is designed as a target for many languages. An LLVM backend is in the works, which means being able to write front-end code in one of probably 20-30 languages. I'm personally really hoping we get to the point where I can write my front-end in Rust.
Second, Java GUI toolkits all sucked and produced ugly UIs. I know some developers liked Swing and people claim it can be made to look native, but I've used hundreds of Swing apps and they never lived up to that promise. For better or for worse, HTML+CSS works well enough and people understand it, so WebAssembly's ability to interact with the DOM is a massive improvement over what was available to Applets.
Third, Sun's ability to secure the JVM plugin was, to be kind, pathetic. WebAssembly should be better since it should inherit a lot of what we already have for JavaScript. For better or for worse, the JVM was just never designed to protect users from the people writing Java code whereas all JavaScript engines were built from the ground up with that in mind. WebAssembly will be built with that same mindset.
Fourth, an open specification vs a closed spec controlled by a single company.
There's probably more reasons, but that covers most of what I hated about Applets that I'm hoping won't be the case with WebAssembly.
Java applets were problematic. They created a distinct runtime with different degrees of freedom and communications mechanisms than the web, generally. It was a security and interop nightmare. Java as a language that can compile down to JS (or WebASM) is fine.
Professional software ( Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office, CAD etc ) and a large majority of games only runs on Windows. There is a plethora of software already developed for Windows which will continue to only run on Windows. There is a large number of people who have bet their careers on Windows and Microsoft. Microsoft has billions of dollars of runway even now and they are a very diversified company in terms of how their revenues are generated. I can still see this ending very badly for Google.
It is only a matter of time before the end of Windows only for those apps - the new Microsoft under Nadella is operating system agnostic. Losing out in the mobile space forced the abandonment of "devices and services" and vertical integration to a horizontal "platform first" strategy, but it was always going to happen (and many pundits wanted Microsoft to anticipate it rather than react to it).
The kernel doesn't matter - developers can and will target runtimes not operating systems. Today we're in a situation that would have been infeasible a few years ago: Microsoft producing apps for iOS. The strategy here is all about blocking competitive software from establishing itself against Office (the real cash-cow) and thus Microsoft services (a potential cash-cow) while the runtime is developed and rolled out across all systems.
What used to be vNext is now .NET Core and it is brilliant. It is largely open source[0], builds on open source tools and the runtime is small, fast and portable.
VS Code is an example of this new strategy: if Microsoft can make VS[1] and their developer toolchain (which has always been the best environment, imo) cross-platform then any app can be made cross-platform (this is working, at least in my case - I was never a .NET developer until .NET Core).
The advantage Windows will hold is DirectX and WPF - but for everyone else there is xwt[2] and coincidently (or not) Microsoft just bought Xamarin who wrote their cross-platform Studio product in xwt.
In the interim developers can use the existing cross-platform GUI toolkit: html. Bind to a local port and open the browser and point it to http://localhost:random_port (I just happen to install Sonarr[3] this morning which does this, it means you can distribute cross-platform binaries) or write a thin platform-specific frontend.
You are right of course, I was comparing them to ChromeOS. Now that ChromeOS about to be able to run Android apps Photoshop Express and Office Mobile will be available, but they are essentially offering a different feature set.
I'd be surprised if Adobe isn't working on making Creative Suite a cloud-only service.
I'll also be surprised if it doesn't suck compared to the desktop version.
You can just about justify running Photoshop and Illustrator on a remote server. But most of the world doesn't have the bandwidth for 4K video previewing. Or even for uploading native 4K from a camera.
For the usage you describe, i would actually recommand a Tablet ( iPad ) rather then Chromebook. I was actually waiting to upgrade to iPad Air 3, but instead we got a 9.7" iPad Pro.
From a hardware perpestive, once the iPad Air gets 4GB Ram, there is very little difference between it and the Chromebook.
> You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem
Wow, you'd have to wonder how everyone here actually learned how to use computers back when there was no Internet and no help from your friends because you were the only one using them.
It's NEVER been easier to use a computer nowadays, not just because they have become better designed and more user-friendly, but also because documentation and help is readily available everywhere at every corner.
Giving up when facing an issue these days is just called laziness, nothing else.
As someone who started using computers in 1982, I would have to disagree.
Computers today are incredibly powerful, and because of that, operating systems and applications have become complex beasts themselves.
My first computer only had 4K and a text based interface. As an end user, I only needed to know a handful of commands. Most navigation was done through multiple choice text menus.
Even moving into the early 90s, when using System 6 and System 7 on Macs, the very notion of needing a second mouse button was considered a bad thing. If you needed that right button, your application design was too complex.
Fast forward a quarter of a century, and I can't live without a context menu, but I have 35 years of accumulated knowledge that lets me take this stuff for granted..
IMO, the amount of stuff I need to know today to get around a computer is an order of magnitude more than "back when".
Back in the old days, all you had to do was load and run stuff off discretely labeled physical media like a cassette or floppy. You only ran one program at a time. You didn't need to worry about network security, because the only network you could afford consisted of you putting your sneakers on and bringing a disk to another machine. Your computer was turned off with a switch. There was no need for a "shut down" command to fire. If you had a virus, it meant you caught a cold. Things were really simple back then.
> Back in the old days, all you had to do was load and run stuff off discretely labeled physical media like a cassette or floppy. You only ran one program at a time. You didn't need to worry about network security, because the only network you could afford consisted of you putting your sneakers on and bringing a disk to another machine. Your computer was turned off with a switch. There was no need for a "shut down" command to fire. If you had a virus, it meant you caught a cold. Things were really simple back then.
That's way back in time. I was referring to the good old 90s, where the web took off with home computers that were already running stuff like Win95 and people were not complaining about being clueless on how to use them. Even older people (>50s) has no big issue to start using computers then, and I'd argue Win95 was a way harder system to learn for a newbie than Windows 7 or Windows 10. And on top of that recent operating systems are fairly stable and don't crash anymore when you plug a USB device or things like that - they have automatic driver installs, a bunch of hardware already supported by default, and I could go on and on. The situation is MUCH better for the end user nowadays than 20 years ago.
> I was referring to the good old 90s, where the web took off with home computers that were already running stuff like Win95 and people were not complaining about being clueless on how to use them. Even older people (>50s) has no big issue to start using computers then
I remember this time completely different than you do.
But not than 30 years ago in the ways you mentioned. You had one book and knew all. That even worked with Unix. Then 3.1 and 95 came and stuff got complex. Yes, we are better for it but less complex for the end user is not really true. Those arcane commands (remember we had wordperfect which was keyboard only and everyone was fine with it) were maybe annoying but fast and efficient once you knew them.
Don't be so elitist. "Back in the old days", computers were a niche item that only called to enthusiasts. Now they're an everyday appliance.
It's like calling people lazy because they call a refrigeration technician to fix their fridge rather than do it themselves. Computers are ridiculously complex, and you need a ton of knowledge to even start troubleshooting any but the most trivial problem.
Most of the old os related pain points have become rather trivial, like installing peripheral hardware, upgrading software and searching for stuff. 95% of the remaining complexity comes from applications, not the OS. They wont go away by porting those applications to html5.
I'm not elitist at all. I am simply pointing the fact that someone who has an attention span of 2 minutes and refuses to search for help when facing an unfamiliar situation has a problem in the first place.
Let's not try to make everyone believe that our machines are the issue, where the issue is clearly cultural before everything else.
I think you nailed it but I also think that people who don't want to learn how to code, or learn a software suite, or create something important or beautiful and simply prefer to look at a computer as a source of entertainment and communication (read as 70% of the population) are summarily doomed.
it is actually an educational problem - specially in the US.
Educated people will favor the more flexible operating systems to create things (don't think just programming, think video, pictures, whatever), dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email".
That said the reality is that the majority of people are the ones that do not want to learn, and thus to be successful it is necessary to cater to them. It makes sense and make their life easier.
But do not fool yourself thinking it's not an educational problem for the "feel good" statement. Learning photoshop is a big deal and it's not because of UX. It's because of the concepts behind the editing.
> Educated people will favor the more flexible operating systems to create things (don't think just programming, think video, pictures, whatever), dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email".
It seems like a pretty biased view. Apart from the fact that even in HN-like circles for many people most part of their job is just answering e-mails, there's tons of people who don't need anything more than web. I wouldn't consider somebody who mostly does research, reading a lot of stuff and being satisfied with a simple editor "dumb". (there are even quite fine online latex editors too)
> dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email"
You know smart people can prefer a simple, less-modifiable system as well, right? Just because they don't share the HN communities view for an open product doesn't make them less intelligent.
Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products. The entire source tree for the OS (minus a few proprietary twigs like the Widevine Encryption Module for DRM on Netflix) is a publically-accessible Git repository, and all Chromebooks allow the user to put them into a Developer Mode, which removes the low-level restrictions the system normally runs userspace in to ensure stability and security.
Contrasted with the largely-locked-down proprietary development of Mac OS, whose few open-source concessions were shuttered a decade ago, the notion of Chrome OS being somehow less legitimately hacker-friendly just seems plainly absurd.
> Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products.
The OS itself is pretty open. If I'm not mistaken though, if you put it into dev mode, you get a scary screen at every reboot, and an opportunity to hit space to re-enable OS verification, and apparently wipe out whatever modifications you've made to the system. In theory, actually rebooting the system should be a fairly rare event, but that's one of the reasons I haven't considered a Chromebook. I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right?
Macs are basically the opposite; the OS itself is closed, but the hardware isn't difficult to install some other OS on. You've got options, because you aren't wedded to the software.
> I understand the security concerns, but if the hardware makes it difficult to do what I'd like, then whatever security they implement is moot anyhow, right?
"Difficult" as in a supported developer mode? Of course there is a way to reverse it otherwise they would have non-stop support calls from people who hit the button to see what it did and freaked out. The whole point of Chromebooks is that you can always get back to a usable state no matter what you do to it (even chuck it out the window, just log-in to a new one and you're 100% up and running).
I'm thinking about "ctrl-d" to boot, and the likelihood that my kid's going to eventually play with daddy's laptop and pound on the spacebar during reboot.
What I'd like: A Linux distro of my choice that boots as cleanly and directly as the original ChromeOS. A dual-boot to Windows would be nice too, although maybe at this point I could get by with a VM.
What I think a Chromebook would provide: The option for a Crouton install within ChromeOS or a dual-boot. I think that both options require developer mode. During boot, you get a fun little screen telling you to push the spacebar to "re-enable OS verification", which takes you into a system recovery process...or you press ctrl-d to boot the system as-is.
That all sounds like something that I can do, but it sounds like a step back in usability for me. And besides:
> Caution: Modifications you make to the system are not supported by Google, may cause hardware, software or security issues and may void warranty.
At least some Chromebooks allow to install a custom bootloader that does not show the scary warning through simple hardware tinkering like [1]. I think this is a good compromise from security perspective.
I appreciate the ingenuity involved, and I appreciate that it's possible on at least some of the hardware. It reminds me of the modifications necessary to replace a drive in the original Xbox.
If I was looking for a weekend project and a cheap machine at the moment, it might be fun to do. It also brings back memories of compiling new drivers to get some hardware working, haha. Likely, I could find similar hardware that doesn't take as much effort to get working the way I'd like.
Do you realize that selfies and emails are creative endeavors? It takes a lot of work to take a good picture or compose an email that conveys anything useful.
That's hard to believe (I believe it, but it struck me as incredible at first). I don't know anyone with a Chromebook, and it's such a different way of computing that it's hard to believe it's taken off so much in such a short time.
I think it is reflective of a new generation whose first computing experience was with phones and tablets. The idea that nothing of importance lives on the device is a huge paradigm shift, and I don't know that old folks are comfortable making the shift yet (I'm not entirely there, and, despite being middle aged, I like to think I'm way out front on the technology curve). The mention of Chromebooks in schools lends some credence to this notion.
Anyway, I think it's great. A Chromebook is so much more empowering than an iPad or tablet (which is what I think this is actually mostly replacing for folks, rather than high end laptops). A keyboard opens up the door to really building and creating, USB ports allow expansion, and Chrome OS is hackable in ways tablets are not.
The idea that nothing of importance lives on the device is a huge paradigm shift ...
Rich vs. thin client is a pendulum that seems to swing about every 10-20 years.
In the mid-'70s, a computer was a big box by IBM or DEC with a number of thin terminals attached. These had enough power to display a screenful of interactive information without having to talk to the server constantly (sort of like an early version of HTML forms).
Then PCs happened, and suddenly you could have your very own device with a slice of the power of that DEC. The client was suddenly so rich but widely available connectivity so slow -- 300-1200 bps modems -- that most people never connected to a server (except for special national networks like France's Minitel).
By the mid-'90s, thin was in again. Sun and Oracle defined a "Network Computer" spec. Apple was planning to build devices for it, but then Jobs had better ideas and the NC never really took off.
So we got ever richer clients in even more personal form factors. The iPhone became the ultimate rich client: in the App Store model, each online service provider is expected to build a native binary and deliver it through Apple. Microsoft has been plotting along similar lines with the Universal Windows platform.
At the same time Google has been trying to push the pendulum back to the thin end. With the new "Instant Apps" model [1], even Android is being turned into a web-like platform of app fragments delivered on the fly. Will be interesting to see how far they can take this -- will the Android runtime be part of Chrome eventually?
I don't think it ever actually swung into popular usage, until now, even though a lot of smart nerds wanted it to. So, I don't think a pendulum is the right term for what's happening (or what happened with the NC spec).
I think it's a hill that a lot of people and companies have been pushing computing tech up for many years...now we've reached the top, and we're rolling down the other side. Getting to the top required getting mobile networks "fast enough", systems small enough (because what's the point of being mobile if your system is big and heavy...might as well leave it plugged in at home or at the office), and the web (or something like it) advanced enough to be the platform on which these network apps are built.
If it were a pendulum, we'd see it swing back in 10-20 years. I can't think of any scenario in which that'll happen, even as small/personal devices get more powerful.
Note: I don't know if our destination is a good one. But, momentum and gravity (and hundred billion dollar companies) are definitely pushing us in a pretty clear direction.
The momentum comes from the massive overinvestment in network capacity made as a result of the dot-com bubble. Bandwidth doesn't scale like storage or processing capacity do, though, so I predict the current balance in favor of centralization will eventually reverse as the cost of shuttling data back and forth to the center once again comes to outweigh the cost of doing all the heavy lifting at the edges.
Network capacity, at least in most regards, currently dwarfs the expansion that happened back in the late 90s (unless you're talking about some later "dot-com bubble"). I'm not sure how you can argue that we're still trying to fill up bandwidth built in 1999. Sure, there was some build out during the bubble...but, I don't see any reason to think network infrastructure is going to shrink or that costs will increase remarkably.
Makes sense that my specifics would be out of date. I'm not arguing that network infrastructure will shrink; I'm observing that the scaling factors for network infrastructure investment are not nearly so favorable as the scaling factors involved in CPU or storage capacity. We can already build hardware with capabilities greatly in excess of our actual needs. When network capacity becomes a bottleneck, it will be much cheaper to take advantage of all that latent capacity at the edge than to invest many billions increasing network capacity, and we'll see yet another pendulum swing away from thin clients toward fat independent hardware devices. Then the market will change and lots of money will flood into network infrastructure, and for a few years the pendulum will swing back again. It's been going back and forth like this for decades.
Network capacity is a continual bottleneck, and many billions are spent to upgrade the transport network yearly.
Transport signals have gone from 2.5G to 10G to 40G to 100G to 200G per wave, and from 8 waves to 16 waves to 40 waves to 96 waves to 100+ waves per fiber.
The bottleneck has existed for a decade at least, and is invested in to keep pushing it out at the same time all this other stuff is happening.
Hmmm. Interesting that speeds at the edge don't appear to have changed much at all, in years. I didn't think there was much ongoing coverage expansion going on. What's driving the capacity investment? Greater utilization of existing connections? What's using up this capacity?
I came of age during the thin client craze of the 90s and I remember the grey beards then telling all of us whippersnappers that it was just the latest swing of the pendulum. Cut 20 years later and now I'm one of those grey beards.
Chromebooks are very popular as a first laptop for children and teens these days, they are cheap many can be had under 200$ and they provide basic office and apps/games especially now with the play store.
Effectively Chromebooks are the new "EEE PC"/netbook which were also very popular with children and teens as they were chip as dirt which meant that they were often bought as a gift or when a child needed a 2nd computer to take with them.
So when you have devices that cost 199 it's not that surprising that they outsell devices that cost 899 and upwards.
If the "premium" chromebooks outsold MBP's/MB's it would be as much as a surprise to me as why would anyone want to put a Core i7/i5 CPU and upto 16GB's of RAM in a chromebook in the first place.
I love my Chromebook, with Crouton you can run Debian on it and for the most part don't have to worry about wonky drivers and the like. I currently work as a Sysadmin and I don't want to carry $800+ dollars of hardware with me while I'm up in ceilings running cable. It allows me to spend my downtime writing code so I can get into development one day. I get over a full day on a single charge. Great little machine. I'd consider one of the premium ones for my next laptop.
Yeah well you are a "unique" case, I would be surprised if even 10% of Chromebook owners knows what Crouton or chroot is :)
HN users don't see Chromebooks because HN users are a very special subset - highly educated and well paid which works in development and IT at large.
If you look at children and low wage blue collar workers you'll see many more of them those are the people that buy what one would not even consider a budget laptop but an entry one.
Those are also the people for whom Google and Facebook are defacto the internet, I've recently met people that didn't knew "Office" even existed outside of Google Docs.
If you are high school student that only wants to get access to Facebook and maybe be able to write a small paper you don't need more than a Chromebook.
If you are a truck driver or a security guard that wants to be able to read email or watch YouTube you don't need more than a Chromebook.
And for those people a 150-250$ device makes all the sense in the world.
College students would probably still be able to use a Chromebook for 99% of their tasks, but since Apple has a student discount it's chic Apple most likely will still continue to rule the College class.
There are a few people in my office (web dev shop) that have Chromebooks. With a little tinkering to open them up, they're perfect.
I mean really, 99% of the time all you need is a web browser and a connection to remote into the machine that's doing the real lifting for you.
My favourite part is the disposability. If it gets trashed or stolen, all I have to do is sign in to a new chromebook and generate new keys to be back up and running.
My little sister is now 14, and Kubuntu is for her easier to use than ChromeOS ("why can’t I put this there? Why doesn’t that software run? What? I can’t have other programs?" – I installed ChromeOS for her on her laptop for a while).
The major difference between a Ubuntu and a ChromeOS install is that one of them has a lot of marketing, the other doesn’t.
Here in New Hampshire I've seen many, especially among older people who are way too overwhelmed by PCs and Macs. Things like viruses, installing programs, updating the OS, "my hard drive is full? How do I fix that?", etc, there's just so much they have to learn that technical people and younger people take for granted as simple. The Chromebook reduces the bar to maintaining your own machine among low-digital-literacy people.
Many just want a "laptop" to get and send email, look at their grandkids on Facebook, complain on the local facebook page group about xyz, look up weather and news, and buy things online.
This group also does not understand why some laptops are $600 and others are $1,400 and yet they appear to run the same programs and visually look the same. I don't blame them. A few of my friends have said, "My mom/dad (aged 40-60) needed a new computer and I convinced them to get a Chromebook, now I don't have to answer all their technical questions anymore."
They are fantastic machines for the technically less-literate and frugal-minded.
That may be because of who is buying them. They are making huge inroads to public schools (a former apple stronghold). The "Cloud Everything" bit solves a large "where's my data" problem that used to plague our kids WRT school work. No more taking the wrong thumbdrive to school problem.
well I am glad an inexpensive but useful item is making inroads. I remember the day when it seemed nearly every damn local politician was lining up to congratulate themselves on putting for the idea to give every student iPads before making sure the roof wasn't falling in.
Technology is very important to learning but there are so many useful and inexpensive ways to do this but this requires those in charge to look past the marketing power some companies wield
I use a Chromebook. But I also put it in devmode, put on Crouton, and run a full-blown Ubuntu on it as well. Everyone I know with a Chromebook does the same thing. Then it becomes an inexpensive Linux Laptop that handles some things automatically.
Same here. Anybody who repeats the "Chromebooks are for kids who don't do anything sophisticated with their computers" schtick is just showing off their ignorance. A decent Chromebook (e.g. a Pixel or soon one of the HP/Acer models) plus Crouton is a more real development machine than anything Apple ever made, because it's more like the server where you'll eventually deploy. Then, unlike any of the other dozen Linux laptops I've had, it works and continues to work without requiring constant technically-proficient care just to keep things like wifi or suspend/resume from breaking. Mine replaced both an MBA and a Zenbook running Fedora. Haven't looked back since I got it.
> Crouton is a more real development machine than anything Apple ever made, because it's more like the server where you'll eventually deploy
Well, this assumes one particular type of development! I would not choose a Chromebook to develop, say, Chrome!
I tried Crouton a few years ago, wanting to run xbmc. Audio didn't work, because it required a newer version of the Linux kernel. It turns out you can't just install a stock Linux kernel: you have to use a patched device-specific kernel that Google provides, and for my device, the Google-provided kernel was too old. Perhaps I could have built some frankenkernel, but instead I gave up and got a real Linux box.
I would not try to use Crouton again for a general Linux box, because you become dependent on Google for updating core software.
Yes, and it would be fantastic to use a Mac or Windows box to debug something involving Linux kernel drivers, right? There will always be special cases. Sometimes there's only one solution, and you take what you can get within those parameters. I've worked on "one of this exists in the world" kinds of hardware a few times myself. Nonetheless, the "Chromebooks are for n00bs" meme is still BS. For the majority of people who are in love with their Macbooks, a high-end Chromebook is a more than adequate alternative. The fact that it didn't suit your special needs doesn't change that.
Developing software for something other than a Linux server is not some bizarre edge case. I was reacting to your unqualified claim that a Chromebook is "a more real development machine."
My "special needs" was running popular and well known Linux software. Many people in this thread have said that running Crouton on a Chromebook is just like having Ubuntu or Debian. But this is not so:
1. Google does not reliably update core software
2. It's harder to get help when things go wrong, because the system is sufficiently different from an ordinary Linux box
For those reasons, if you want to run Linux software, it's better to use a familiar Linux distribution, and not ChromeOS.
If you want/need to run a very particular version of Linux software, then maybe a Chromebook's not for you. But many thousands of people successfully run all kinds of Linux software that works just fine inside the Crouton environment. I didn't and wouldn't say you're a bizarre edge case, but xbmc is being far more picky about versions than it needs to be and that's not ChromeOS's or Crouton's fault. It's unreasonable to criticize the platform because it didn't satisfy your one use case, and it certainly does nothing to refute my original point that ChromeOS isn't just for newbies.
To develop things like Chrome, a mac won't be enough as well. Chances are you will need a powerful desktop beast anyway, in this case, a Chromebook can be a super handy addition for checking emails, browsing the Internet, not to mention you can also ssh to your desktop and work off the Chromebook.
So with Crouton, you don't actually dual boot. It's more like a VM, but it uses the same kernel that Chrome OS uses, so it's more like Docker than Virtualbox.
I have a cheap 11" Acer C720 and I probably use it more than my Macbook Pro. I have command line only Ubuntu installed, and the result is a tab I can open to have a full linux shell, much like how you would use a macbook. For all intents and purposes, it's the same OS, but it's not.
A few things I particularly like are battery like (maybe 8 hours?), no fans, matte screen, and macbook like keyboard and trackpad. Also Chrome OS maps the F1/F2 keys to forward/backward keys in Chrome, which I use all the time surprisingly.
All in all, I would highly recommend a Chromebook. For development it's great. If you don't want to use Crouton, a linode server you can SSH into is just as good as a macbook really. Now that they will be able to run all Android apps, it's even more tempting.
I don't know if it's age really. I've explained, to developers well older than me things like "well, this practice is bad because <reasons> here's an article from <before I was born>" or having to translate old fundamental concepts into their latest hip implementations. "this use calls less for virtualization and more for something like a Chroot..." "what?" "Sorry I mean like a Jail... cgroups...? LXC...? sigh Docker." "Oh! Yeah, that makes sense. nods as if they understand"
I don't actually do any of those three. Underneath ChromeOS is a *nix variant. So Crouton actually allows one to change the root directory to something else [like away from the meaningless root that ChromeOS puts you in, essentially in a Downloads directory, and to the actual root of the machine].
In practice, this means that if I hit a three key chord, then I flip over to a regular xfce, and if I hit another three key chord I go back to ChromeOS.
I do all web-browsing in ChromeOS. I do all programming and textediting in xfce. Or rather in vim, using my standard vim setup. [I'm a mathematician, so I do somewhat minor programming and lots and lots of LaTeX writing].
I have a similar setup, and ran into storage problems pretty quickly. Eventually I reflashed it and installed Linux natively, and got a fast 64GB SD card for my home partition.
Out of an abundance of concern for security, I use a Chromebook running without any browser extensions for all my banking and investing activities.
I take it as a given that my Chromebook will always be more secure than my Macs and Windows machines. Less likely to have invasive malware of all types.
I currently have a Toshiba Chromebook with a gorgeous screen and good battery life. It just works.
I think it's more that, as a software engineer, I'm not at all representative of my age cohort. Non-techie college friends my age seem split on the Chromebook question, but because the working world has not embraced them I suspect that even the young kids who use them every day now will be forced back into a more fat-client computing system if they enter the workforce in the next few years.
I have a question for any under 20 year olds. What are likes/dislikes in current tech? I know it's a general question, but I'm honestly interested.
For instance, is a physical keyboard even necessary? Do you use FB? Apple, or Android phone? Contracts, or prepaid? Do you buy stuff from small websites? Or, is it just not worth the security risk? Does it bother you if a website demands a profile picture? Does the repairability of a electronic device matter? I'd appreciate any feedback.
I'm just curious. I'm not one of these rich guys trying to corner the next big trend. I'm pretty poor, but interested in tech., and would like to get a gauge on where it might be heading.
I do know someone who has a Chromebook. He's a professional writer [1] and if he loses his computer, all he has to do is get a new one and he's back up and running. He does quite a bit of travel as part of his job so it really works out for him.
And he's not a first time user of computers either. He grew up with an Atari 400 (yup, he was a teenager during the Golden Age of home computers).
How is it a different way of computing? You can use it offline and frankly any laptop nowadays without internet is pretty crippled.
It's actually really easy to believe and frankly not particularly interesting. The cost of a chromebook is like 1/3 or something of that of a mac. I'd sure hope that unit volume was higher..
Most of my friends (ages 20-ish on up to 50s), when told to write a resume, build a spreadsheet, make a drawing, etc. will reach for Word, Excel, Illustrator/Photoshop, whatever. Local computing, while fading in importance, is still the dominant mode for most people for some tasks.
Other tasks have completely made the transition for many people. Listening to music; everybody under 30 streams it, and looks at me funny when I talk about "owning" an album. Email and messaging; no such thing as local email clients anymore, except for us stubborn old-timers, or people who have to use Outlook for work. Nobody I know, other than nerds with their own websites and servers, has an email address that isn't @gmail.com (a few @hotmail.com and maybe one or two Yahoos). I work on mail admin tools, and a webmail client and still use GMail exclusively for my personal mail. Photos are on their way off the local machine, but I think it's about 50/50 among my friends, as to whether they keep local copies or not.
Anyway, I've already said how I think it's different. It sounds like you disagree with me, though I'm not sure what the basis of your disagreement is; it seems to be that a regular laptop can do everything online like a Chromebook. Which I haven't said anything about; I'm speaking of who I think will be immediately comfortable with the Chromebook way of doing things, and I think it's people who've not been trained to think of a computer as a permanent storage device.
> Most of my friends (ages 20-ish on up to 50s), when told to write a resume, build a spreadsheet, make a drawing, etc. will reach for Word,
Personal anecdote - I like updating my resume at least once a year. A few years back I struggled to find the latest local copy of my Word resume. Frustrated, I found one that was a few years old, updated it with details for the intermediate years and proceeded to import it into Google docs. Now I don't have to look too hard to find it.
> and frankly any laptop nowadays without internet is pretty crippled.
Depends on what you keep locally on the machine =) I've generally got a bunch of DVD rips, a few dozen games, my dev environments, documentation for whatever I'm working on (API references and such), a bunch of ebooks...
My important data is on my local machine, and my irreplaceable data is backed up to the cloud. It's a very different paradigm of computing, compared to the people whose laptops are "crippled" without Internet.
Yes, and I said I believe that Chromebooks are replacing tablets rather than laptops. If a kid is getting a "not-quite-a-computer", I'd much rather it be a Chromebook than an iPad.
My sister works in a semi-developed area of Africa where electricity is unreliable in quality and presence at the best of times, and it's turned out the computer equipment she brought over years ago was pretty ill suited to the conditions and developed problems immediately. She went with all Apple because that was the craze at the time, and most of it was inoperable by the end of the third year.
After listening to her describe the conditions and her needs, I suggested a few changes: transition to lower wattage mobile equipment, integrate redundant, portable power, and more effective use of solar. This boiled down to Chromebooks, portable APs, and certain smartphones, marine and other LA batteries, and lots of lithium USB power packs.
In return, she shipped me her old Mac hardware, which I opened up and emptied of all dust, sand, and scorpions before diagnosing most as damaged from overheating. It was awful how poorly those glossy screens held up to environmental abrasion, and the one unit that survived, the smell still hasn't left completely.
The Chromebooks (K1 based), which held charge on testing for 8-10 hours under heavy use, are light yet durable, have no moving internal (or servicable) parts, are or can be sealed against the environment, and are passively cooled. They also run the full Docs suite offline, take excellent dictation for transcription, can remote into her other computers, and they look nice. The model was just under $300 and had a 1080 screen, better than decent speakers, and most importantly, it plays x264 video so she can catch up on her shows.
My only concerns were for the lack of non-removable batteries and the very narrow cylindrical DC plugs the chargers use, but battery diagnostics have been great, and since they never all have to be charged at the same time, about half of the chargers can break (though none have, yet) and not cause any issue.
I don't know how most people on HN live, if they have good electricity, air conditioning or potable running water, whether they own vehicles that they can drive to pick up and haul perishable groceries around in, or if they can cheaply or quickly replace equipment that dies sooner than it should, warranty or no, within their countries. But for anyone who doesn't have all of those things, I'd say Chromebooks would be an exceedingly appropriate choice.
Even in Africa, not having those and having good, stable and cheap internet is a really weird case.
It's true that it is weird from the Western perspective, but it's actually true.
I work in a building with a company who build Flow-batteries. Their biggest markets are in South America and Africa where the mobile networks are often more reliable than the electricity networks because they run batter backups on their towers.
Communications are often seen as more important than anything else. If you have access to a phone you can find out where to get clean water.
Her work is regional, specifically around lower socioeconomic areas (houses with mud floors and walls, long walks to get daily water), but she HQs out of a fairly large city not far from their capital.
So to answer another way, wherever the internet is good or bad, so is the dust. That's why these systems had to be field-capable.
e: I should clarify that I meant wired internet. The smartphones are for providing cellular internet, which she gets more places than not. Wired internet is less generally available to her far outside of the cities. She's not particularly interested in technology, so she doesn't use smartphones as USB modems for her portable network for their Chromebooks, opting to transfer documents to the phones to upload or email. If I understood right, she waits until they're back to transfer any other contents to their office computers.
As I've written earlier, ChromeOS doesn't interest me. It's a tightly locked down linux-y distro as a vector to peddle Google services. It's not complicated, it's very cheap and almost impossible to mess something up because it's so easy to wipe and all your data is on the cloud. That's the appeal and why they're booming in schools, but I find it dangerous for multiple reasons.
I wrote at more length about it in yesterday's ChromeOS post[0]. I don't think it's the year of the linux desktop anymore than Android is the year of the linux phone. Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer.
I find the book itself more interesting. Netbooks were crap for a long time, but things have gotten cheaper and I enjoy the form factor. Writing this from an Acer C720 running GalliumOS as we speak, but I'm in the super minority of Chromebook users. Read the Amazon reviews once of a Chromebook and you'll see what they find irritating or glorious. Hint: It's not the lack of a good IDE or inability to install gvim. Also, anyone that says Chromebook sales are great because their such an 'open hardware ecosystem' is fooling themselves [1].
> I don't think it's the year of the linux desktop anymore than Android is the year of the linux phone. Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer.
Perhaps Stallman has a point when asking people to talk about Linux as GNU/Linux.
> Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer.
I don't necessarily think that an operating system being locked down is equivalent to anti-consumer. For the vast majority of consumers, I think that opening up the full complexity of linux would just be too much hassle and not worth the gains.
I think crippling systems is anti-consumer. Ubuntu is an example of an attempt to mitigate the hassle while allowing the user to control their own device. Is it perfect? No, and they have a very diverse audience to please with one offering, but its a more correct approach. Setting sane defaults and removing confusion in configuration is one thing, but that's not what Google is doing. Google limits software to their repo, makes it difficult, unintuitive and scary to opt-out of things (ctrl-d? insta-wipe ! warning on boot), biases all their software and services with no enable-able alternative and tracks absolutely everything. It's like a tricked out feature phone with a keyboard.
I'm all for standard accounts that have strict privilege boundaries, but with ChromeOS, the consumer can't even decide to be a true administrator. No one's saying everyone needs to be a sysadmin, but a user shouldn't have to enable Developer Mode and deal with usability dark patterns if they want to.
Mozilla used to let the consumer decide, but even they require you to run a separate build in order to install software without their blessing: User freedom is one of their core principles. If developer mode features and privacy opt-outs silently disappear from an entrenched ChromeOS, most wouldn't blink.
Reddit[0] attributes this largely to Chromebooks snatching up most of the K-12 education market from iPads, with Google vaulting ahead while Apple was under-prioritizing that market.
Motivations school districts might have for switching: (1) Cheaper, (2) Keyboards are nice for typing, (3), More resilient over time due to easy software updates, and (4) Easier to debug (similar to prior point; nothing is stored locally, so a 3 minute re-image fixes most software problems)
In addition, folks in that thread think that tablets are generally the worst of both worlds as compared to laptops and phones (phablets?), whereas Chromebook are everything that tablets should be.
I have sadly been witnessing my local school investing heavily in iPads and arguing against it. I think iPads are not only not terribly useful for education, but I think for certain kinds of education they actively inhibit it. Especially the most relevant skills of the future - complex manipulation of knowledge and information (software programming being one but just one example). It is no coincidence: the very thing people like about iPads is that they are explicitly designed to reduce cognitive load by simplifying the entire interface. That reduced load is great when you are kicking back on the couch, but it's essential when you are trying to accomplish something complicated. It doesn't help that they are wasting huge amounts of money (if you are going to buy a tablet for children to stab their fingers at and play games on, at least get a cheap one for half the price of an iPad).
Yes, of course. The poster is sharing information that shaped their opinion. The location is irrelevant.
In such an informal setting, the quality and worth of the source are up to the consumer; particularly when it is such a simple investigation. Do you trust or distrust the source? That belief guides your consumption of the poster's opinion.
Don't think of it as being an authoritative source. "While we're having this discussion over here, another group had a similar discussion and reached these conclusions" is valuable input just the same
I've become a full-time Chromebook convert over the past 8 months despite having had Powerbooks & Macbooks over the prior 15 years.
So what happened? It's simple:
* Everything runs inside Linux containers with reasonably secure seccomp profiles.
* SecureBoot provides some reliability against attacks. (I do not use Cruton or feel the need for it despite doing development)
* It's inexpensive. Arguably, buying my machine was free when considering the credits for Google drive, Google Play, and Gogo-inflight wifi.
* It does everything I need, with the caveat that "everything it doesn't do" is something I can do on a server or VM running in the cloud (or a closet).
Honestly, I see the Chromebook as a secure thin-client. That's good because I don't think it could be much fatter and secure. I certainly don't trust running anything on a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop.
I'm using the Toshiba Chromebook 2 which I purchased because it was the best performance / value / screen-quality. I didn't want anything with less than a 1080p display.
Today, I'd buy (and probably will buy) the HP Chromebook 13. It starts at $499 but includes a QHD+ panel ("Retina") and an "Intel Core m" CPU (or higher). Only one model of the range is available right now, but options will include Pentium, m3, m5, m7 CPUs and up to 16GB of RAM. It is thinner, lighter, and cheaper than the Macbook Air.
As someone who works in a K-12 setting, I'm not surprised. 1:1 chromebook initiatives are exploding across the country, and with it, a flurry of new edtech apps for K-12. At the end of the day, Chromebooks win over both iPads and Macbooks on price and functionality -- 21st century skills include being able to type and work your way around a computer. On top of that, Google's provisioning and management systems are so far the best, but definitely not perfect yet.
I'm curious, but is a Chromebook useful in offline mode? My family and I have been on sabbatical sailing half the planet so far. Internet has been a big headache as Iridium tops out at 2400bps. And data plans in developing countries and islands can be extremely expensive, up to $1/MB.
I've found our android tablets to be more crashy offline as apps that can't get an internet connection go braindead, blank, or just kick you out. Based on my Android experience I've been reluctant to get a chromebook even though I know they are popular in schools.
As a parent I'm also concerned about the privacy aspects. I believe schools get a special Chromebook that cuts back on the tracking, does this hold true for their retail models?
But if you are a bit confident in your Linux skills, then I would recommend looking into Crouton [1], which allows you to easily access a fully functional Linux. I'm not sure what you're after, but this is what I use, and it satisfies all my needs. [I mean, it's just a Linux laptop, but that's what I need].
"...on sabbatical sailing half the planet so far... Internet has been a big headache as Iridium tops out at 2400bps..."
Interesting use case. How about a solid refurbished laptop (or rooted Chromebook) with a set of Debian stable DVDs (you can install thousands of packages offline) and a local install of Wikipedia[1] and a dump of Project Gutenberg[2]?
I was really interested in ChromeOS. We have a loads of laptops and tablets onboard for entertainment, navigation, schooling, and boat management.
I saw that the Chromebooks were really popular and figure it might replace one or two of our laptops that are slowly dissolving in the salty air. But working offline for months at time is essential. This old battle axe of a Macbook Pro will have to keep on trucking. I've already lost the SD-card slot and glass is cracked (dropped from a motorbike)
> I'm curious, but is a Chromebook useful in offline mode? My family and I have been on sabbatical sailing half the planet so far. Internet has been a big headache as Iridium tops out at 2400bps. And data plans in developing countries and islands can be extremely expensive, up to $1/MB.
Not used a Chromebook, but I assume whatever works in offline mode in Chrome (e.g. Google Docs and Amazon Kindle) works in a Chromebook.
> As a parent I'm also concerned about the privacy aspects. I believe schools get a special Chromebook that cuts back on the tracking, does this hold true for their retail models?
I don't think Chromebooks have any additional tracking beyond what Chrome has.
I had a chromebook for about a year. I tried to make it my main laptop. I really did. But online only apps just don't work for me (I'm not always close enough to an internet connection). The native apps weren't usable enough, and often froze the whole desktop. Crouton, while cool, is flaky. I never did get audio working on it, and it also froze the system once or twice a day. And the lack of local storage became problematic. I could plug in a USB flash drive, but some stuff HAS to be on the main drive, and shuffling things around is a pain, especially on their file manager (which is SLOW, although not quite as horrible as Mac's file management).
I gave it to my dad, who just loves it! He uses it for his email, browsing, document editing, photos, and videos.
If that's all you do, then Chromebook is the system for you.
That's interesting, and seems like a direct opposite for the experience I have with my Asus 13 inches chromebook. It is now my main laptop, I use it for days and it never freezes.
I have crouton on it and this comment was typed in firefox on crouton. Whenever I need to, I switch to Chrome OS to use Chrome. I had problem with getting audio to work in the beginning but to be fair that was around the same time I really didn't know how to switch between Crouton and Chrome OS.
It would do with more storage but I have a 32gig sd card in it which gives me a little more mileage than depending only on the internal storage.
Honestly the only REAL work I do on it is learning Javascript even though I got it specifically to learn PHP but things seem to require a lot of tweaking when installing PHP and even setting up ur webserver that I gave up and decided to learn Javascript, which only requires a browser. But I'm sure that's my problem with Linux and not Chromebook.
I have never had an "Ultrabook" before so I really enjoy the sleek nature of this and I don't think I'm going to ever buy any laptop bigger than this ever and the all day battery life makes it awesome.
Apart from the usage above, everything else is like your dad's though. Maybe crouton may have jx gotten better since your experience
A couple of weeks ago I bought an Airport Capsule for backups.
Thursday, I got the "your backup can't be verified" message, meaning that Apple threw away my backups. This is Apple product backing up to Apple product. I tried fixing it with fsck_hfs but it wasn't finished when I went to bed.
Today, I woke up and my MacBook Air is doing a nice loop where it lets me log in, then reboots. It's done that 10 times. I've tried resetting the PRAM, going single-user, logging in as a different user and finally re-installing the OS. Still doing it.
My wife and I have MacBook Airs and there's a shared Mac Mini in the family room. We got it mostly because the older kids needed Microsoft Office. It's attached to a 22" screen but is rarely used. The schools are using Google Docs and rarely print anything out.
My 3 kids love their Chromebooks. They use them for Youtube and reading fan fiction and things like that.
I'm typing this on a 2013 Chromebook Pixel which I bought off someone on Craigslist because I was curious to see what the build quality was like. My MacBook Air has been sucking wind with 4GB of memory and I've been waiting to see what the new MacBooks look like.
I take a lot of photos and I find that the Chromebook doesn't handle looking at 700 photos very well. But for 95% of what I do, the Pixel is better than the MBA. It's got bad battery life but then my MBA does, too. I had it hooked up to an external screen because I wanted more resolution and using the charger too much wrecked the battery.
Almost everything I want to do is shared online. I want my kids (and parents of other players/students) to have access to photos. I bought a family version of ARQ (highly recommended) because I wanted to do local data, physical off-site (at my mom's every couple of months), Airport Capsule and stored on Amazon's servers.
Now I'm trying to figure out how to re-invent things where I just use a Chromebook. Maybe I just use the Mac Mini for copying photos off SD cards to Flickr and onto a hard drive.
Anyway, point is that I don't think my kids will ever be very interested in spending their own money on a Mac even though they love their iPhones.
Does it bother no one else that this is so locked to the Google eco-system? Perhaps more than any other device on the market is locked to an eco-system, including Apple's iOS walled garden?
I also fear that between this and iOS, we are starting to see a divide between production and consumption devices more than ever. I don't consider that a good trend.
Not really. Ideally you go into these things with your eyes open. I can see our house going from five heavily used Apple devices to zero in the next couple of years. If the barriers were as bad as people pretend we could not do that. It probably helps that I have an awareness of the issues involved and haven't bought in too heavily to the more restrictive services.
I likely will have to buy some of the kid's games again for Android but they have outgrown a lot and as they grow older anyway. Having a device with a keyboard that can run minecraft pe, or access the web or be used for school work, or run a linux chroot seems like a huge leap forward over iPads.
My Chromebook was surprisingly hackable and getting a shell is pretty trivial. You can easily live in a chroot on a model with better hardware. Sometimes selling a tiny bit of freedom or privacy for trivial entertainments or day to day practicality is a reasonable tradeoff.
The problem is that most people aren't you, they don't know how to migrate their services and there is just enough of a barrier to make it difficult that most people won't. Apple's walled garden is less of a concern to me than Google's services lock-in.
I bought a cheap Chromebook to play with and for a lightweight disposable travel machine but ended up using it for programming/web development for a time. A nice secure reliable browser environment plus secure shell in combination with online services isn't perfect but it is doable.
They work better as a secondary device for power users but I suspect the number of people who can use them as a primary device isn't negligible and will increase as the platform matures.
I have mostly retired my Chromebook for a higher spec laptop running a full linux desktop. But I can see a lot of potential for Chromebooks and with some nicer models coming along with access to the Android store I can see them replacing both laptops and tablets for family.
They are secure, practical and low maintenance and I am not at all surprised that they have done well in education and I expect higher specced ones have a very good chance in enterprise.
Somehow I don't think that their hardware is as much an issue as their price point. As a developer you'd still be a fool (or just loaded with elbow grease) to attempt developing with a chrome book.
Why? I've developed 100% on a cloud VM for years. All I need locally is a browser. Obviously wouldn't work for some things, but as a full stack developer: no problem.
You can even get a full Ubuntu installation in a chroot very easily using a neat tool called Crouton[1]. Crouton lets you jump in and out of chromeos and ubuntu with a keyboard shortcut. I had a very good experience running crouton+ubuntu on my Acer c720, and I imagine it'd be even better on a higher powered computer
If your internet connection sucks, or you need hardware access, or you're doing anything that requires a low latency, or you want to run the software locally for any reason, cloud VMs won't work. I can only imagine it working for a small subset of app developers. It's hardly a full stack solution.
Not a problem for me, and it's pretty hard for me to develop when my internet connection sucks anyways (no modules, no documentation, no cloud access, etc.).
> or you need hardware access
Yes, this is the primary valid reason I see.
> you're doing anything that requires a low latency
Low latency from what? My cloud machines have super low latency to each other and to the net.
> you want to run the software locally for any reason
Running it in my cloud machine is locally, to me. The only reason it would need to be truly local if you're doing something regarding hardware / peripherals / etc., as you mentioned.
How is the web ssh client experience, do you miss anything from a real terminal? I would imagine there would be some keybindings conflicts when using vim or emacs.
I've been using an unrooted Chromebook with the SSH client (NaSSH) / the mosh app for about two years for development, and it's pretty great. If you put the app in maximized mode, CrOS routes just about all keybindings to the app. In fact there are a few that don't get routed to the OS that I wish were (I think Alt-Tab is one of them).
I use the Cloud9 IDE, and it's great! I've had a few issues over the years, but fewer than when I used to develop locally. And I can log on from anywhere.
Hey, that's really cool! That's great for finding layout bugs. Though some of my WebGL doesn't work, and it's too slow to judge things like whether an animation is smooth, so you'll probably want some lab machines.
Still, it seems strange that a web developer would prefer to develop on an OS that only supports one web browser!
I strongly disagree with this.
I've used a chromebook as primary development laptop for years.
Chrome shell works great.
c9.io is a great IDE when I want something prettier / easier to work with than vim in a terminal
Whether you're running ChromeOS, or Crouton, or GalliumOs, chromebooks (even cheap ones) are great dev machines.
Their MacBook Pro line does have (and has had for some time) some of the best hardware available.
Perhaps it doesn't match purpose-built gaming notebooks, and definitely not desktops, but they usually are the first to have a new Intel processor, have newish graphics hardware, pioneered mainstream PCIe storage and high-resolution displays...You might pay a lot for what you get, but there's no doubt it's good hardware.
Not sure about being first with the new processors. I don't think the MacBook Pro has got Skylake yet, has it? Though with all the power management problems on the Surface Book, Apple may have dodged a bullet by being slow on Skylake. As for the graphics chips, you're limited to Intel integrated graphics unless you get the high-end 15" MBP with the Radeon.
I generally like my MacBook Pro, but I'm less convinced it's superior to PC hardware as it used to be. It feels like Apple has lost interest in the Mac, and PC vendors are selling comparable hardware for about half the price.
They don't have skylake yet - but its been about 370 days since the last refresh. If they don't update at macworld next month they'll give up half their damn market share.
I have a Chromebook and a Macbook Pro. I use both, they have their places. I feel much happier traveling with the Chromebook - I don't care if it gets stolen or destroyed. It was only $300 and nothing is stored locally.
I volunteer with a nonprofit running their internal IT and we use chromebooks for all volunteers who need an organization provided computer. We have a couple of windows laptops that were donated that get used for people who need to use Office for writing grant proposals. We're looking to expand into a physical building and will be providing a space with machines for community members to use for creating resumes/job applications/etc. and we'll almost certainly be using either chromebooks that can be checked out, or the chromeOS desktops systems.
All our infrastructure runs through google, the machines are really affordable for a small non-profit, and given that many of our volunteers and the people we serve are not very technologically literate they are far easier to manage and help people do what they need to do.
As an individual I don't know that I'd ever buy a chromebook- I have the advantage of being able to afford a regular laptop and I would rather throw money at a laptop than deal with the inconveniences of areas where web everything just doesn't work, but I can see them continuing to gain traction in institutional settings like nonprofits, schools, and even workplaces for people who don't need access to a lot of applications or local processing power.
Doesn't surprise me, chromebooks are so much better value than anything else!
I was going to get a dell xps 13 when that power saving bug was unveiled so I ended up getting a toshiba chromebook 2 and a 256gb SSD for <600$
Now I'm running native linux via seabios and loving it. I hate the spacebar screen on startup but I'm not sure I'd be willing to pay 500$ to get rid of it.
I am using one since mid-2014 and it has made my iPad bite the dust. It's just as quick access as iPad and does so much more and faster. Browsing is miles faster than on iPad.
So while a lot of people think it's a PC that does less, I think it is more a tablet that does more.
My 2008 Macbook died in March, that triggered me to mostly use my 2013 Pixel for dev. Although I do have an 27 iMac at home.
My dev is mostly Web Dev + GCP and moving to Firebase (canonically all front end dev). Hence even though I have Ubuntu via Crouton, I rarely need a local Fuse file system. For node work and CLI work I spin up a GCP VM. The VM costs about $13 per month, but I turn the VM off and pay pennies for storage.
For apps written against the "native" Chrome API, Google Drive is presented as a filesystem the same way as the local filesystem - any service can expose itself similarly via the [chrome.fileSystemProvider API][1].
The problem there is that Google will likely release an updated Chromebook Pixel soon, also.
With coreboot enabling installation of Linux on the Pixel for developers (And stock ChromeOS for regular users, of course), there is no reason to prefer MBP over the Pixel.
Requiring apple hardware to develop for ios is a pretty big reason to prefer mbp over pixel. Even if you aren't an ios developer, a development shop that does mobile will most likely deploy macs to their developers.
Similarly, if you develop cross-platform, having a MacBook Pro that can do Windows, Mac, iOS, Android & Linux development all from one device is really compelling.
Also, older MBPs are still more than usable. I'm tying this on a 2012 retina MBP with 16GB RAM. There's really nothing I can't run comfortably on it. Even when they rev the MBP, there's still a ton of people who've bought retinas in the last 4 years for whom it will make no sense to upgrade.
I haven't seen any suggestion that Chromebooks are somehow directly subsidized by Google - are Samsung, Toshiba, etc. getting some kind of kickbacks for making and selling the hardware? ChromeOS itself is free to license for vendors [1]
But most have fairly low-end CPUs, not much RAM, and small SSDs, so I don't think they compete with Apple for features, per se.
Not really, the linux is a volunteer effort spearheaded by a non-profit where members take advantage of the advance of the kernel for their own products/ideals, while Google is very much a for-profit corporation which benefits here by the increase in users for their services. Services which are ad-supported for the most part.
yeah but how many of these K-12 educational chromebooks are going to get that installed on them? these just allow google to start tracking people even earlier in life than they may have otherwise been able to.
Once again, in what manner are these Chromebooks tracking people more than alternatives would? And I take it from your comment that you're implying Chromium OS tracks people less?
> Are users tracked any more on a Chromebook than a) a MacBook Air running Chrome b) a MacBook Air running Safari
Can you use a Chromebook without being logged in to a Google account? Can you block ads, trackers, and other creepy JavaScript on a Chromebook? Even the ones from Google?
> Can you use a Chromebook without being logged in to a Google account?
That's a good point. You log in to the OS via a Google account. You can log out of that account from Chrome-the-browser, though. (In fact it looks like I'm currently only logged in to my employer's Google Apps account, and nobody's told https://accounts.google.com about my Chromebook account.) And I log into my Chromebook with a dedicated Google account, but I realize that not everyone will.
However, you can install Privacy Badger or anything else that you could install on other Chrome platforms, and it should effectively block Google's cookies from reaching other domains. There's probably some JS involved in running the browser itself that's shipped on the device, but if you want to avoid all google.com-delivered JS, you should be able to do that. (I believe this is no different from Chrome on the Mac.)
Forever. I'm happily using an original HP11 with no issues at all.
I bought it because I was spending most of my time in ssh/emacs and I wouldn't be too worried about losing a Chromebook. Three years later the joke's on me.
As others have noted, crouton is super and updates are seamless. I use it locally way more than I'd anticipated. IMO the standout feature is the keyboard.
I second this. I'm using a just-refreshed 12" Retina MacBook ‘toy’ (BTO m7/8GB/512GB) and it is an utterly perfect, ‘nervous’ little machine that suits my varied computing needs perfectly (local databases, spreadsheets, data exploration, symbolic mathematics in Mathematica, general productivity word-processing/email and assorted browsing & multimedia). This is a machine that deserves respect.
Is this one of the new macbooks? I'm strongly considering doing exactly this but figure at this point I might as well see what they have in store for MBP, or even MBA if they don't can the product line.
People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extremely simple spreadsheets. It's way more important to have cheap, reliable, accessible, safe hardware. You'd be amazed how many people encounter a problem with their computer and give up because "it's mad at me." This isn't an educational problem. The technology is failing them. Wrestling with an operating system sucks.
And then there's all of these amazing up-coming technologies like WebAssembly and WebRTC. If we can have the security and uniformity of a Chromebook and run Photoshop and Quake and BitTorrent directly in the browser with no overhead, then there's absolutely no point for users to deal with the muck and grime of whatever bad state they get their local filesystem into.