I did toy with the idea of getting a Chromebook but didn’t like that it was totally net-reliant. If your connection drops, as all connections do from time to time, the Chromebook is temporarily useless, whereas my laptop, with its combination of local and cloud storage, will still be functional in many areas.
Looking at that review for the pixel… Upwards of a thousand for 4GB RAM, an i5, a fairly mediocre graphics card (and approximately fuck-all for games that work with the OS), and no local storage? I got my windows laptop, an ASUS F550-CCX with 4GB RAM, an i3, NVIDIA 720M, 500GB local storage, and it’s got windows pre-installed, for just under 500€. Those prices seem even more grossly overinflated than the macbook I used to have! Maybe low-end Chromebooks are slightly less of an insane rip-off… But yowza, I cannot see anything to justify that expenditure for that low-end of a machine. Especially when it’s not compatible with windows and you can’t even use Skype on it.
I think Google meant that more as of a tech demo and luxury showoff item. When it first came out, it had the highest resolution display (in terms of pixel density) on the market. These days, a Yoga 2 Pro or Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus would get you a much better computer for the same price. It’s really silly that Google hasn’t yet lowered the price on those things. Because, yeah, they’re ridiculously overpriced and underpowered right now.
I use an Asus C720 chromebook at home pretty much exclusively.
It boots from cold to usable in about 7 seconds and about 9 hours battery life, and it is very light. I use a combination of Google docs, Google drive and microsoft’s “one drive” for cloud applications. They have limited functionality but I’m not a power user so simple text documents, spreadsheet and presentations work perfectly well. ( I run a consultancy company and those cloud options are perfectly adequate for my purposes)
Browsing is very fast, multiple tabs with no slow down and It doesn’t get clogged up with any malware or spyware,
The real killer app for me is that I loaded Ubuntu on there as well and can use that when or if I need full offline functionality. The really nifty bit is that I can “hot swap” between the two OS’s if i need offline functionality and it just takes a couple of seconds and a couple of keystrokes to go from one to the other (and they have visibility and access to the shared storage). What ever I can’t load and run on Chrome OS I can run on Ubuntu instead (open office, GIMP, various emulators, VLC, accessing my network drives) and those apps run very quickly indeed.
So for my own purposes it is a great little piece of kit. It gives me most of the functionality I need in Chrome OS mode and Ubuntu fills in any gaps.
It cost me £189 and I believe they are about $199 in the US, It won’t suit everyone but I was surprised by the amount of usability I get from what I though was just going to be a browsing machine.
So… what the answer? Why a Chromebook rather than this laptop? Boot speed maybe?
Also I saw a reference somewhere (wikipedia I think) that a Chromebook inherently needs no virus protection for some reason.
My daughter is well on the way to wearing out her Chromebook. No complaints, no limitations, no problems so far - in or out of school. The rapid boot is a plus (as it is on Mrs. B.'s Acer Ultrabook with a 256MB SSD).
I use a Chromebook at home. That said, I am not in college and do not need it for document editing or anything like that. The only negative I’ve experienced is not being able to use itunes with it, but I do have itunes on my iphone and ipod so I can download music directly to those if I want to. I also have Spotify on my iphone since I found Google Play doesn’t work very well (for me at least). The woman at Best Buy told me that the Chromebook should last longer than a regular laptop as well. I forget why.
The price is another factor for going for it if one is on a budget. I got mine for around $150. It was priced at around $200 or so and I got a discount for buying the display model. Best Buy may have been biased when they said this, but they told me that similarly priced regular laptops were pieces of crap and that I was better of buying this if I don’t need to use lots of programs, etc.
Chrome OS is a lot lighter than Windows and will feel faster on a similarly equipped system. They use less power and will last longer on a battery. They are usually lighter than cheap laptops. They come with solid state disks which are faster than regular hard drives (but you do get less space). They do boot quickly (good Windows laptops do as well, but the cheap ones with cheap HDs and cheap processors do not).
And yeah, you don’t have to worry as much about viruses. Although, really, these days Windows is perfectly functional with the included virus protection (Microsoft Security Essentials).
I’m thinking about getting one. My main need for it is writing and editing university papers. Thoughts?
I bought an Acer C720about 4 months ago. (The company I work for dumped Microsoft mail and went with Gmail.) I use the Acer for everything. All work is saved on Google Drive and I can share any file with any other user which is a nice feature for collaborating. And yes, I can modify Word/Excel/Power Point docs and PDFs with the Google equivalent.
I have an external mouse/keyboard/speakers and Samsung monitor hanging off of the Chromebook.
At home I use an Epson WF-3520 wireless printer and I can print to this device from anywhere. (Its cloud enabled out of the box).
I even upgraded the Solid State Drive in the Chromebook to one of these in the event I want to install full blown Linux on the machine and do programming.
I still have a Lenovo T430 running Windows 7 in my office but the handwriting is on the wall. Also, I don’t need thumb drives anymore because everything is saved to the cloud. If the Chromebook breaks/gets stolen so what. Nothing gets saved directly to it.
Google also provides a nice help center.
I’ve been in the computing field since the late seventies and this is by far one of the nicest, least expensive, utilitarian devices I have owned.
We gave my mum the HP 14" Chromebook for her birthday, and a few days later my SO’s laptop gave up and he got the same one for himself.
Speaking for both of them, there is nothing they miss. Working offline (or online) with Google Drive works fine for both of them. Other than that, there is Chrome, and it does everything they need. Turns out, they just don’t need all the other fluff. 