When we talk about laptops still being popular and important, we tend to talk about things like the precision of the mouse and the power and flexibility of a desktop operating system. We talk about all the things they can do better than a phone or a tablet. We talk about more. But it’s worth talking about the power of technology that strives to do less – much less. The thousand dollars I spent on a Pixel didn’t buy my mom crazy extensibility, or the ability to run powerful apps like Photoshop or Excel. It didn’t even buy her that much storage. But it did buy her a beautiful, well-designed product. And most importantly, it bought her focus, and the ability to spend her time using her computer instead of trying to learn how to use it.
That’s a lesson I think Steve Jobs would have liked very much.
There’s something happening with Chromebooks that seems to take place much outside of the sphere of the technology press – in schools now, but once kids have them, they’ll find their way elsewhere. We may indeed be entering a post-PC world, but it’s not based on tablets.
It’s Chromebooks.
Since the drivers for many of the peripherals I am using will likely not be upgraded to Windows 10, it may be time to start anew. The prospect of holding-on to my current Windows 7 always fearing of a forced upgrade is scaring me.
All things considered, a chromebook, even a low-end one, appears to be a viable alternative to a Windows based netbook.
Good thing that the kids have the opportunity to get exposed to Chrome OS while at school. They may be less fearful of the unknown.
Chromebooks (and tablets) are practically useless outside the home because they need on a fast internet connection and have extremely limited onboard storage.
Chromebooks have been a complete failure in Australia because free wifi hotspots are limited and wireless data is extremely expensive (~AUD5/GB) with very small quotas.
Edited 2016-02-03 00:06 UTC
I’ve owned three Chromebooks and much of what I’ve done on them has not required a net connection.
Yes, my primary Chromebook use is browsing, and my Chromebooks have replaced netbooks and tablets for that use. My most recent Chromebook is a Flip which has also replaced a Nexus tablet.
I have used two of my three Chromebooks to create web pages about bicycle touring both at home and while I’m on the road. Before I retired, I spent 3 to 4 months a year on the road. Since I’ve retired, I tour more ;-}!
Obviously, I need a wireless connection to upload the text and images that I have created and or edited to create web pages, but I don’t need to be connected to the web to do text or image editing.
About 10 of the 30+ apps I have installed on my Chromebooks are designed to be used offline. One of my favorites, duolingo, is actually an offline Android app which also runs on my Flip in tablet mode.
The first time I toured with a Chromebook – the original Samsung ARM Chromebook – I used Crouton to install the Linux environment I was used to using on netbooks and laptops. A week or two into that tour, I screwed up that Linux environment. It only took me a day or two, on the road, to find offline ChromeOS programs that could do both text and image editing I needed.
After I got home from that tour, in 2012, I fixed the broken Linux environment, but rarely used it. I’ve not bothered to install it on my newer systems.
ChromeOS is a simple, pretty secure, OS which has proven to be just the opposite of “total useless” for me!
From your comments it is obvious your tasks could also be performed on a tablet (or even a phablet).
How do you save 200GB of videos on a Chromebook?
How do you print a document without an internet connection?
etc. etc.
I remember talking to one of the sales guys at a computer shop two years ago. He told me that nearly everybody who bought Chromebooks (when they still had proper hard disks) intended to run a Linux distro.
No one in their right mind would create a web site on a tablet.
Why not? Hook a keyboard up to it and boom. There are some good HTML editors on iOS at least. I couldn’t see creating a website on a Chromebook myself, mostly due to a lack of tools (assuming ChromeOS only of course). Add to that, and never underestimate this, that I get to choose which keyboard sits in front of my screen without having an extra one.
Hook up a screen, add a stand to the tablet, and boom, you might as well have used a laptop, which would have been better in the first place.
Two methods for storage:
-external via sdcard or usb
-replace the m.2 ssd if it has one, like did with my the Acer c910
IF the video player does not support the format you need, there might be one in the App Store, or, better yet, install Linux via Crouton and jump into that to run VLC or any other media player you need.
ChromeOS sees airprint/zeroconfig and cloud print printers on a local network, and sometimes shared printers, too. So far seems to work fine for me.
All of those ‘solutions’ are expensive and impractical for the average user.
The average user uses their iCrap device to surf the web. A chromebook is a step up from that.
One thing we have to remind ourselves is that even the most average person on this site is not the typical computer user.
Apple can kill the chromebook by simply allowing bluetooth mice. An iPad + keyboard and mouse makes VDI very useful for the advanced or business user. For average users it allows them to use the iPad for word processing, etc.
A Windows netbook has (nearly) all the advantages of a Chromebook and is far more practical.
But you get all the downsides of Windows too.
Plus the cheap Chromebooks work fine, while Windows on a cheap netbook is quite an unpleasant experience.
Obviously you haven’t tried the USD179 Lenovo 100s. It is just as responsive as a Chromebook and far more capable.
I have tried the HP Stream 11, it was truly an awful experience.
On first boot it would take several hours to download and install updates, meanwhile it would be barely usable. Afterwards the available disk space was less than 5 GB. Browsing the Internet with only few tabs was possible, but if you dared open one tab too many, or tried to do some form of multitasking, the system would grind to a halt.
In contrast, my sister’s Acer C720 Chromebook has no such problems. If you open too many browser tabs it will get a little slower, but still acceptable. Updates cause no significant slowdown. After initial setup, there was even more disk space available on the 16 GB Chromebook than on the 32 GB Windows netbook.
Superfish included?
Obviously you haven’t tried the USD179 Lenovo Ideapad 100s. It is as responsive as a Chromebook and far more capable.
Sure. Too bad they don’t make them anymore.
WTF?
Haven’t you heard of an Idea Pad?
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/
No, the average user uses their device to surf the web, whichever device they happen to like. Even the so-called “average” users with full-blown Windows or Mac computers use them mostly to surf the web.
Actually, VLC is already available via the Chrome Web store
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vlc/obpdeolnggmbekmklghapm…
It is, however it won’t play most things the desktop version does. I can’t get it to play any of my AAC audio files or H.264 videos. It just sits there. About the only thing it will play for me is mp3 or flac. I was quite disappointed.
You wouldn’t buy a Chromebooks to do video editing on it anyway, so that by even mention it. The right tools for different tasks and all. That being said, I do it all the time, it’s called a scratch disk, everyone who is serious about video has one, it’s just a fast external drive. I also have a 64GB 280MB/s SD Card for video editing as my videos are never more than a few gigs.
To edit my videos I use Blender and Davinci Resolve. Blender is running natively under Chrome OS, I just installed a Package Manager that installs all of the necessary libraries to make an application work under Chrome OS. Something a lot of people don’t know about because they never do their homework. To use Resolve I just dual boot into Arch Linux, I’m using a custom boot loader. However that being said, I use Chrome OS 80% of the time. You can also stream Blender or even OpenShot, as well as many other Linux application, directly from the web using any number of Services, try rollapp, they use the same technology as Adobe to stream Photoshop, which I also have, still in beta but it works flawlessly.
Adobe is working on bring their entire creative suite to the cloud. Again, not many know this because they don’t do their homework. The Chromebooks platforms biggest failure isn’t the platform itself but the ignorance that surrounds it. People just assumes Chrome OS is nothing but a browser and have no real grasp as to what is actually available online. They just surf their entertainment and news sites and think that’s it. There are literally thousands of cloud based apps available that are not only as powerful as their desktop counterparts but in a lot of ways better. Especially cloud based IDE’s, collaboration is just brilliant. Which is extremely important when working in a team. There also faster because you have access to a real multi-processor Xeon based rack server instead of using your local computer resources. There is a monitoring tool in a lot of then that tells how many machines your utilizing at the moment, I have used up to 240 CPU cores and have compiled apps that took at least 15 minutes to finish on my laptop in less than 3 using the online servers.
It will also be the same when Adobe finally release Premier for the cloud, render times will be cut in 3rd, depending on which package you purchase. When I use Blender or Maya I even sometimes use a cloud based rendering service to complete my projects, the cloud has everything. Though for my smaller projects I use a custom built render-farm based on 5 Nvidia Jetson K1 boards, paid less than a 100 for each on eBay and the results are nothing short of awesome, it will eat a Mac Pro for lunch.
Though I’m planning on building another one using 4 Nvidia 690 GPU’s in SLI that will be flashed into 4 K5000 Tesla cards. Though this project will cost about 1800 to do, GPU’s are 200 a piece, I will be using an AMD FX-9590 (still extremely fast without breaking the bank), 32GB RAM, 4 Hitachi 15,000 RPM 600GB SAS drives and a 128GB PCIe SSD.
I’m also getting a new laptop, the new Razor Stealth with ThunderBolt external GPU, using a AMD Fury R9. I’m still going to use the Pixel for development work, which it’s great at.
[q]You wouldn’t buy a Chromebooks to do video editing on it anyway, so that by even mention it. The right tools for different tasks and all. That being said, I do it all the time, it’s called a scratch disk, everyone who is serious about video has one, it’s just a fast external drive. I also have a 64GB 280MB/s SD Card for video editing as my videos are never more than a few gigs.[/q}
I didn’t mention video editing. I said that the Chromebook is completely useless because you can’t store a useful amount of data on the device.
The fact is a Chromebook is really nothing more than a tablet with a keyboad. It has so little on board storage that you can’t even keep a decent collection of videos. You can’t even transfer your data to an extrenal storage device FFS.
there are some web application to do online video editing …
Australia may not be representative example, especially when compared to relatively densely populated Europe. I live in Poland, it is generally easy to find a free wifi here, also LTE coverage is pretty good (it would cost ~10 Australian dollars for a 30 GB dataplan on separate SIM card). I use my Chromebook whenever I need to work outside: as a terminal to log into my home computer (VPN + SSH/RDP). Ability to work 10h on battery power is a huge selling point. Note that Chrome supports off-line apps as well. So even when off-line you can still do some work.
A data plan here in Australia costs an extraordinary ~AUD10 per GB. That is why nobody has a Chromebook. [Even in very affluent areas the public libraries are full of people using the free wi-fi.]
Edited 2016-02-03 07:03 UTC
Maccas.
+1
Edited 2016-02-04 03:56 UTC
Even in Europe, I don’t see any uptake on Chromebooks.
I live in Germany and travel across Europe for consulting gigs.
Never seen anyone using a Chromebook, meaning on the trains, airport, Starbucks and every other coffee with wlan access.
The only place I have seen Chromebooks was on the Saturn stores, always trying to sell them at prices similar or lower than Android tablets with keyboard.
The pattern is always the same when one such devices appear in a Saturn store.
Only one or two on display, prices decreases steadily as “Offer of the day”, until eventually they disappear after several weeks of being on display.
In Germany (and a bunch of other EU countries) the Chromebook selection is highly limited. That’s a supply side problem, which predetermines the demand.
At least in Germany there’s the Medion Akoya S2013 now. It’s a start, I guess.
Use Crouton to run Linux on it as a chroot side-by-side OS to ChromeOS, then what you can do on a Chromebook is limited only by how well you know Linux.
Yeah, and I get the dubious pleasure of the half-arsed software along with it. Thanks but no. If I wanted to use Ubuntu (or any other distro for that matter) I’d already be doing it.
A Chromebook might be a good choice for people that never have to print out stuff onto a “real” piece of paper.
Instead of loading the driver you would need for your printer onto your machine, your “to be printed” document is:
1) sent to google
2) transformed into a binary for your printer
3) sent back to you
4) your Chromebook sends it to the printer
Here the issues I have with that:
1) if you don’t have access to the internet you can’t print
2) non existing security in regards to a document
IMO the printing mechanism is the worst thing Google came up with.
Supposedly on purpose…
Here the issues I have with that:
your “to be printed” document is sent to google
I mean, WTF?
Look at it from another perspective, if they supported local printing then they’d need drivers which would put them at a significant disadvantage.
It would be so much better if every printer supported standards (ie postscript) and could be auto discovered on the lan, but its generally only the higher end ones that can do so even tho the cost of implementing postscript should be negligible these days.
I believe one problem with postscript for printers is more expensive chips and royalties need to be paid.
But I could be wrong.
The other problem with implementing postscript is one of security. There is no way when rendering a post script document to tell how long it will take or how big it will be. It’s trivial to create a postscript document that results in an infinite size document with an infinite amount of time to render. This in turn means it’s trivial to DoS a printer which supports it, and potentially waste huge amounts of paper and ink/toner.
This is why most of the newer high-end printers directly support PDF instead (which is mostly a subset of postscript), as it does not have this issue (assuming that the decoding of embedded images and fonts is safe).
PDF has a lot more surprised as far as I know:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6eaiBIQH8k
Which didn’t stop them from implementing local print support on Android. Pretty weak argument there.
And how is this helpful from a user’s perspective (which is the only thing that should matter)?
I certainly don’t care how good that solution is for Google or how much trouble they saved themselves (and how much more data they gather with this for free).
I’m the user – I don’t like to be the “used”.
Chrome introduced APIs to provide print and scan services last summer: https://developer.chrome.com/apps/printerProvider and https://developer.chrome.com/apps/documentScan
So it’s definitely under discussion (eg https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=439433), or https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=546110: “We recently launched support for writing USB printer drivers as Chrome Apps”
I wonder how hard it is to adapt CUPS drivers. The typical renderers (PDF, PS, DWG) seem to be provided already, there’s a PPD->CCD converter (whatever CCD is), so for USB printers the part that seems missing is to define the USB IDs any driver is responsible for.
Not always true about printing. Using cloud print I can print to my Brothers printer without a problem, and I did not have to set the printer to be shared via another machine for that feature was built into the printer along with Airprint. I can print within the network or even over the Net.
Not true, just install CUPS, the Linux printer platform. You can easily do this by using a package manager, you can also install other Linux apps. The Chromebooks is only as powerful as the user who uses it.
When I send a print from my chromebook at the same time as my wife’s Windows computer, the chromebook’s print beats the PC’s. Don’t have to reinstall drivers when I switch to a new chromebook or update the operating system either.
Is the hardware worth $1000? If yes, can you install (Fedora) Linux on that?
As it is already running Linux (Chrome OS is a Gentoo derivative), you can run any distro. You may need a custom kernel.
Or you can febootstrap into some directory and have Fedora running in a chroot alongside Chrome OS.
I like to think of them as a browsing appliance that would cover about 95% of web browsing use cases.
I use mine for study and casual browsing so I don’t need to find a power outlet during classes.
It doesn’t do everything (cause it’s a browser based OS). If you are one that’s complaining about how “crap” they are, then don’t buy it. There are a whole bunch of other people who would find them useful to own.
I travel alot and I found that my macbook pro is just too heavy and since it is an older retina model, the batteries are starting to fade and it gets only 3-4 hours of use.
Originally I wanted a cheap laptop to take with me and after using a retina, I could not give up the screen. I love chromeos,but the low end offerings simply sucked.
So I decided to buy a pixel 2.
At first I liked it but had buyers remorse since I kept on going back to the macbook pro to do things.
I installed ubuntu via crouton and now this is a decent machine. What I can not do via chromeos can be done via linux.
Add to that I get around 10 hours of solid use in a day without a battery.
I am getting ready to go on an extended six week long trip and I was debating about bringing the macbook along in addition to the retina. To be honest, after sitting down with the macbook for a couple of hours to night and finding myself dealing with OS issues, I put it down and logged into the pixel.
I can not wait until android and chromeos merges. A pixel with the ability to run anything in the google playstore will make chromebooks a very serious contender in the laptop market.
This is my experience of almost a year of Chromebook use for a serious business where security really matters. The good and the bad.
Good-
* cheap, really cheap, even ones with good kb, trackpad and full HD IPS display eg Toshiba 2
* low setup and running cost, skills and effort – beats complexity of enterprise win/Mac – tiny support team needed
* easy to secure really rather well, and without 3rd party software
* Google for work and managed Chromebooks are really reliable, rarely go wrong, unlike constant “issues” with MS
* logging, audit, file history is good
* single version of truth and joint working in realtime is a massive productivity boost and avoids version hell
* boot times super fast, battery long in right devices
Bad-
* gaps – eg can’t easily assert preapproved devices only access service ( ut you can with iOS/android clients)[1]
* ecosystem of 3rd party extensions is rich but can’t trust them with my data (very few exceptions)
* logging has gaps – eg what device was used
* some users will need rich functionality of msoffice libeeoffice or illustrator inkscape or InDesign etc no matter how much “new ways of working” you encourage
* can’t believe there is no official image editor – don’t want to trust 3rd parties
* 1million chars and things sloooooow down – that’s just 300 pages for legal work!
* peripherals like scanners … don’t work
1. https://medium.com/@postenterprise/one-m-billion-dollars-f86ab141480…
I love my Acer 720P Chromebook with touchscreen, probably because I accept it for what it is and what it is not.
I also have a Moto X Android phone, Dell Windows 10 laptop with touchscreen (my first Windows machine in a decade, actually), and my homebrew dual-screen Ubuntu workstation with 16 GB RAM, printer / scanner, local backup system (I also replicate my key directories to Drive and to flash for offsite backup and access from other devices), and endless disk space.
I do “serious” work as a developer and university professor on my workstation, often with my Windows laptop providing a third screen for reference and Windows compatibility testing (the primary reason I bought it).
I also move my lecture slides (created in OpenOffice) to the Windows laptop for projection, so that I can also demonstrate programming technique live when needed. I could use Crouton from the Chromebook, of course, but at a resolution disadvantage – the right tool for the job, Laddie – so since I have it anyway, I lug the heavy Windows machine to the classroom instead.
I use my Moto X for watching sports on Sling in the den while the family watches something else, since no web client is available yet for the Chromebook, and of course for always-available communications while out of the house.
I use my Chromebook for everything else – casual browsing (such as writing OS News posts ;-), email and calendar, budgeting (in Docs while Chromecasting to the TV, so the family can make changes directly), writing books and lesson plans (initially on Docs, then to OpenOffice on Ubuntu for final layout), and so on.
I also take my Chromebook to most conferences, since I can take notes in Docs and do tutorial work at technical conferences in Crouton, yet it weighs virtually nothing to carry around and the battery easily lasts all day.
I certainly understand a budget-constrained person opting for a single device that is not a Chromebook. However, since I can afford multiple devices, I find that my combination of devices provides a much better fit to each of my activities – and for many of those activities, my Chromebook is definitely the best fit. YMMV.
Maybe it’s just me, but the Pixel makes no sense. The hardware’s great, and it’s even reasonably priced for what you get… but all that amazing power is wasted on ChromeOS. It just comes nowhere near to making use of that hardware. They could’ve put a retina screen on the equivalent of an Acer C720 and had the same result with a larger battery on top of it.
Edited 2016-02-03 12:48 UTC
Then I think you should definitely not buy a Pixel. The author, however, made a very compelling case IMHO as to why the Pixel made great sense for his mom, and while I wouldn’t buy one, I’m certainly happy he found what he needed, and wouldn’t call him senseless at all. Not everybody is you or me.
The question is, “Does ChromeOS have future?”
I find it very interesting, and I want to see it continue to evolve. However, Google continuing to support ChromeOS is not the same as Google continuing to develop ChromeOS, and I don’t have a lot of confidence in ChromeOS continuing to be developed.
bought an acer chromebook 15 for an old inexperienced person. he needs writing, browsing and conference software. not having skype was disappointment (for him) but google hangout kind of worked as second best.
before i gave the computer to him i checked how offline mode would work. wifi at home is not stable in every corner of the apartment but it doesn’t matter because these corners are for writing. offline mode just doesn’t work. there is no indication of offline files. if one wants a google doc created when being offline it should either keep that tab as it is the most fragile thing in the world or if the tab is closed system should be rebooted but also one should make sure it will come back online (otherwise the document is lost).
i found on forums people had that problem back in 2013. it was never fixed. this single problem makes it absolutely useless in my case.
i use to use gentoo for eight years and know chrome os was built on top of gentoo, i’m able to compile chrome os from repo or write javascript apps using pouchdb or local storage and then sync with whatever database backend. so no, it is not an old inexperienced person not knowing what’s going on. this system is just sloppy and doesn’t work.
i had to install ubuntu and ended up maintaining one more machine around me. also have to introduce that person to the system which is more complex than the promised chrome os and will probably get a lot of anxious calls when things will get broken.
when computer is rebooted you have to press ctrl+l to boot ubuntu (that’s legacy mode) and i just don’t want to spend a month finding flags and injecting it to bootloader (or wherever f* it needs it) so that reboots itself into ubuntu or customizing system so it can be used by someone who didn’t use gentoo for years. i was ready to pay the price in money and privacy but google cheated here + most of the media enthusiasm doesn’t really help here…
I am on my second Chromebook. This one is an Acer that cost $159 new. I use it in the living room as my go-to surfing machine. I don’t need anything more.
Now the concerns:
1. Printing – I keep seeing this come up. It’s not an issue unless you’re a hard-core everything has to be on my network. You are not the customer for a Chromebook, where everything is done on the net. My printers are always setup for Internet printing. This is trivial with both my HP and my Epson. This is besides the Google printing which is also easy to setup. I don’t even think about it anymore. I just print, from phone, tablet, laptop, Chromebook, you name it.
2. Outside the house. For the last 5 years I have always made sure that I either had mobile hotspot on my phone, or currently, I use a Straight Talk hotspot that costs me $40 for 4GB of data for 2 months. I also use Straight Talk for my phone, but it doesn’t allow hotspot. So combined, I pay $65 for a phone with 5GB data and a hotspot that has 2GB a month. I bring the Chromebook with me on the train to work so I don’t have to worry about it getting stolen.
I’m 57, but this is not the 90’s with everything on your honking PC with a pile of programs you bought at Best Buy. At home, I have one “good” laptop that servers as my home server for development. It even has a built-in backup battery
What I don’t like about the printing support is that every document gets sent to Google… over the internet… to go back to a local printer that is… on my network. It would have been ust as easy to print and contain it to the local network, however Google chose to force you to send all data to them even if it wasn’t created in Google applications. Contrast this with Android which has true local printing support. Even iOS will print over the local network.
Edited 2016-02-03 18:00 UTC
With Android. I use Printer share, which loads a bunch of drivers. Samsung and Apple have similar things.
I believe there is some melding of Android and ChromeOS, so maybe that will help. I don’t believe Android natively supports printing, but some OEMs add.built-in apps. On my Nexus 7 it doesn’t, but it is trivial to add.
You have to remember that people such as myself who use Chromebook are already in the Google ecosystem. Since Google Printing is built into the Chromebook, I don’t even think about. Since it is also built into the Chrome browser, I also can print to my home printer easily.
Android does have native printing support. Basically you download apps that are drivers. These register with the system as printers and you can print over the LAN if you’re in range. No app like PrinterShare needed as long as you have a supported printer. iOS is a bit more limiting and you have to have an Airprint-compatible printer, however neither require me sending my document over the internet just so it can come back to me locally.
That why I am saying you are not the primary target of a Chromebook. Not just printing is on the Internet, ideally everything is on the Internet. Apps, data, email, the whole enchilada. It’s Larry Ellison’s Network Computer come true. That’s why there is no need for significant local storage. I’ve never has a problem with the 16GB local storage – nothing is saved there. Not pictures, music, apps, etc, etc. In that sense, it is not intended to be an Android competitor. I have Android and IOS devices. On IOS I like having 64GB of local storage so I can install big honking games, etc. It is the same on Android. The real shame of Android has been the number of devices that were sold with only 4GB of storage – only about 1 – 1.5GB actually available to the user. That should never have been allowed.
So, again, if you start thinking in terms of a local device, with local storage, local resources, local printing. etc. you are not in the Chromebook world. I have a Windows 10 “fat” laptop, and a Windows 10 2-1 tablet/laptop with removeable bluetooth keyboard. I love surfing the net on my 48-inch TV with the convertible connected by HDMI and the keyboard in my lap.
If you are not comfortable with the concept of a Network Computer (and in this case, an Internet Computer, not LAN), then you definitely should not buy a Chromebook. It all out there in the wild!
That makes sense, save that printing is one thing that is by definition localized. If I print a document, I have to go to the printer to pick it up. It then makes no sense to send that over the internet just so it can come back, now does it? That’s what I’m getting at. Everything else you say is true, and it being in the wild as you put it means accessible everywhere, at any time, as long as you have a net connection. But a distinctly local task, with a physical object that must be retrieved, is not the same.
I think this comes down to the complexity of printing. Having started with Dos 3.3 and now on Windows 10, the evolution of printing in the Microsoft world has been quite a Journey. Years ago, most of the work was in the applications hands. Eventually more and more of the underlying printing work has been transition to the OS – think of Print Manager in Windows 3, then 95, 98 (a lot of change surprisingly), 2000, XP ….
So many printers were created with varying level of direct reliance on Windows, and thus were really “win-printers” just like we had “win modems”. The situation is actually much better now, and I have far less trouble printing from Linux via things like CUPS (owned by Apple I believe). I think the Chromebook forgoes this whole situation in the interest of simplicity. If it tried to keep around printer drivers, scanner drivers, etc, it would increase the specs. Right now, on my Acer with 2GB of RAM and 16GB SSD I have little problems with performance, including HD Video and many tabs. I wouldn’t want to trade the experience just so I could print locally. Like many others have suggested, this would all be so much easier with an agreed upon print format and commands. Once you open the gate to local printers, there’s going to be people griping about their Lexmark and their Canon, etc. To me, it’s not worth it.
Printing, Scanning, etc. shouldn’t go beyond a simple file exchange. Drivers? Common.
Well, that certainly takes care of that.
Seen two chromebooks in the wild in the UK and they have been pushing them pretty hard here. I travel a lot of miles on the train.
My step brother has one, he says it is pretty useless other than a facebook and browsing machine.
More likely to see an iPad with a keyboard attachment or a mac.
Edited 2016-02-03 18:47 UTC
Yeah. The iPad with Bluetooth keyboard works best for me as a portable, long-lasting on-the-go computer. I use the stand that comes with my Otterbox defender to prop it up and set my keyboard down in front of it.
I basically keep my Acer C720P around to keep an eye on Chrome OS. I always hope for more development, but sadly it seems to have stagnated. It showed a lot of promise in the beginning, I must say.
I have an iPad Mini with a logitech bluetooth keyboard and when tethered to my phone I can use it as a decent little “netbook” style programming device.
I have 3 kids in the house and a wife who isn’t very computer savvy. We have 2 chromebooks, and I have a linux desktop and also a small linux laptop for myself. The chromebooks get tons of use. The kids log into their school accounts (the schools use chromeos) and do work. They also cooperatively write docs together. My wife is taking a couple of college courses, she writes her papers and submits then using the chromebook.
I use the desktop with a good ergo keyboard to log into work remotely via ssh, or do very very light work (its a 1017u based nuc type system). I’ve tried putting crouton on the chromebooks, even modified the boot firmware, but one of them always finds a way to quickly wipe out dev mode.
I really really really look forward to having direct print and scan with the chromebooks. Not too pleased with having to register the printers with google, any my printer seems to occasionally lose clock settings which messes it up.
Fast boot, seamless updates are great. Solid user switching is great. Painless factory wipe from evil little munchkins is great. Allowing visitors to easy grab a chromebook, login and just *go* (especially if they have something to show) is great.
Chromebooks get a bad rap for not being able to run traditional desktop applications. There is also this stigma about it only being a glorified browser. This of course couldn’t be farthest from the truth and these comments are made by people who really do not know what is actually available online. I have completely moved my entire development to the cloid, using a fantastic cloud based IDE that provides me with everything I could possibly want or need. I use MS Office online, Audiotool to create my music, Photoshop cloud beta for my photo editing, I stream Blender, yes Blender from a site called rollapp, as well as many other Linux based applications such as Gimp, Inkscake, OpenOffice, etc. There is honestly nothing that I was doing on my Window’s laptop that I can’t do on either Pixel II or Asus Flip (which is really a must have device for only 250 bucks, make sure to buy the 4GB model). I’m also running a custom build of Chrome OS that I compiled myself, includes a lot more including a full LAMP server, VirtualBox (in which I access through the MS RDP), tons of extra Linux commands, just install a package manager and you can install pretty much any Linux package, simply awesome. Make sure to install a Xserver and Xterm in order to run apps like Gimp. You can use Chromes new desktop environment but it takes a little hacking to do it which is just a little more than most people can do. Anyway, I really love my Pixel, Chrome OS and even my Pixel C. I made the mistake of buying an iPad Pro, after just two days of using it I couldn’t stand it, returned it and bought the Pixel C to match my Pixel Chromebooksl. Just a fantastic device.
as much as I now do.
I started with a Acer C720 with 4GB, 128GB SSD(upgraded), and the 11.6″ screen. I am older and really needed the bigger screen so upgraded to the 15″ Acer C910 still with 4GB, 128GB SSD, and through Crouton added Xubuntu.
I use Linux some on it but for what I need professionally it has been amazing. I teach and do statistical research and coding. I use R and Python the most. We use Nitrous for collaborative cloud coding with ease. We use Google Docs. Everyone is on Google Calendar and Gmail. Everything I need for work runs great on this device.
At home, I have several desktops and a workstation class HP laptop for my pro audio work. But for work, the Chromebook is ideal. I could not justify the Pixel given its cost but I look forward to seeing where Chrome OS goes.
“My parents are brilliant — they’re both doctors — but everyday computer tasks frequently spiral into troubleshooting nightmares. Things are frequently broken so deeply by the time they get to me that I have no idea how any piece of tech could end up so messed up.”
It’s not only the OS reset, but the reestablishment of document property, and of a very personalized way of work, in that very particular piece of trash.
Thanks God I ran away.
And of the deliberate works of OS and software Houses to make this composite problem even more of nightmare. Habits create captive clients.
The question is? Who wants to integrate and collaborate with this kind of exploitative ecosystem?
Nilay Patel is pragmatically thinking, and would do the same, but wouldn’t believe that this reduced set of quasi-monopolistic options is the best for the industry.
From a competitive point of view, Google is acting correctly. But the industry as a whole, isn’t.
“thinking about walking my mom through iTunes filled me with dread.”
Or finding her years inverted lists of favorite tunes in his now deceased, unsupported TuneApp, at some unmaintained ‘cloud’ server.