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I wish I could get away from Apple products.

I use macbooks. The display is great and I do like that macos typically just works. No futzing. I'm on iOS because I trust Android less.

It's the lesser of two evils, unfortunately.




I love apple hardware and still have a $5000 latest-gen laptop from them and haven’t had any of the commonly described problems of the last half-dozen years... but I still find myself using my 16gb Pixelbook at least 5x more than my touchbar retina MBP while on the road. Something about the case, the keyboard, the aspect ratio... also ChromeOS is secure like iOS, and can run Real Linux in a VM. It’s an excellent machine. The only thing I super miss is iMessage and Facetime.


I would really love to buy a Pixelbook (or another Chromebook) because I really like the software stack. But the fact that Google never updates the kernel on those things (you're stuck with whatever kernel version was on it when you initially purchased it) is a major reason for me to not get one.

On my Linux laptop I can always run the latest software. On my Macbook Apple will stop to provide software updates at some point, but in practice the hardware is probably going to die before that anyway. On a Chromebook parts of the software stack are never going to be updated. And while most of the users probably don't care about the kernel version itself, a lot of Chrome OS features are dependent on the kernel version: with an older version you're going to miss some features (such as being able to run Linux apps), although the hardware itself would be capable of supporting them.


I don’t know the kernel versions on my phone, my Pixelbook, or my rMBP. They are all up to date from the vendors.

I don’t understand this argument.


On iOS macOS the kernel version isn't an issue as Apple ships OS updates with the latest version of Darwin.

On Chromebooks the kernel version doesn't matter if you only use basic features. But for more advanced features the kernel version determines which features are available. For example, Linux app support for Chrome OS isn't available on kernel 3.14 and older.

Chrome OS devices usually ship with a certain kernel version which isn't updated later on. So you could have a device where the hardware would be perfectly capable to support a given feature, just to not be able to use it because the vendor refuses to update one of the core components of your system.




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