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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 computin

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.

shemnon42 10y ago
> I don't know anyone with a Chromebook 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.
- azernik 10y ago
  Yeah, if I had kids, and they weren't using Chromebooks, I'd advise them to do everything on Google Docs anyway.
- Shivetya 10y ago
  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
azernik 10y ago
I'm in my mid-20s, and I'm not comfortable with nothing living on the device :-P
- vilmosi 10y ago
  You're not the new generation though
  - ball_of_lint 10y ago
    How about 19? That young enough?
    - marincounty 10y ago
      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.
  - azernik 10y ago
    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.
bluedino 10y ago
>> A Chromebook is so much more empowering than an iPad or tablet >> 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. And a PC or Mac laptop is all of things, and so much more.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  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.
blazespin 10y ago
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..
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  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.
  - sangnoir 10y ago
    > 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.
jhulla 10y ago
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.
simonsarris 10y ago
> I don't know anyone with a Chromebook 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.
mixedmath 10y ago
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.
- Kluny 10y ago
  Do you replace Chrome OS with Ubuntu, dual boot, or run it in a VM? Do you spend most of your time in Chrome OS or in Ubuntu?
  - mixedmath 10y ago
    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].
  - catskull 10y ago
    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.
pavlov 10y ago
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? [1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-instant-apps-evolving-apps.html http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-insta...
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  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.
dogma1138 10y ago
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.
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  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 $800+ dollars of hardware with me while I'm up in ceilings running cable. It allows me to spend my downtime writing code so I can get into development one day. I get over a full day on a single charge. Great little machine. I'd consider one of the premium ones for my next laptop.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    Yeah well you are a "unique" case, I would be surprised if even 10% of Chromebook owners knows what Crouton or chroot is :) HN users don't see Chromebooks because HN users are a very special subset - highly educated and well paid which works in development and IT at large. If you look at children and low wage blue collar workers you'll see many more of them those are the people that buy what one would not even consider a budget laptop but an entry one. Those are also the people for whom Google and Facebook are defacto the internet, I've recently met people that didn't knew "Office" even existed outside of Google Docs. If you are high school student that only wants to get access to Facebook and maybe be able to write a small paper you don't need more than a Chromebook. If you are a truck driver or a security guard that wants to be able to read email or watch YouTube you don't need more than a Chromebook. And for those people a 150-250$ 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.
spc476 10y ago
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). [1] That is, he makes all his income from his writing. https://seanhoade.wordpress.com/ https://seanhoade.wordpress.com/ Edit: added a bit of history. And a link in case anyone is interested in his books.

shemnon42 10y ago

> I don't know anyone with a Chromebook 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.

azernik 10y ago
Yeah, if I had kids, and they weren't using Chromebooks, I'd advise them to do everything on Google Docs anyway.
Shivetya 10y ago
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

azernik 10y ago

I'm in my mid-20s, and I'm not comfortable with nothing living on the device :-P

vilmosi 10y ago
You're not the new generation though
- ball_of_lint 10y ago
  How about 19? That young enough?
  - marincounty 10y ago
    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.
- azernik 10y ago
  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.

bluedino 10y ago

>> A Chromebook is so much more empowering than an iPad or tablet >> 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. And a PC or Mac laptop is all of things, and so much more.

SwellJoe 10y ago
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.

blazespin 10y ago

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..

SwellJoe 10y ago
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.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > 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.

jhulla 10y ago

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.

simonsarris 10y ago

> I don't know anyone with a Chromebook 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.

mixedmath 10y ago

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.

Kluny 10y ago
Do you replace Chrome OS with Ubuntu, dual boot, or run it in a VM? Do you spend most of your time in Chrome OS or in Ubuntu?
- mixedmath 10y ago
  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].
- catskull 10y ago
  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.

pavlov 10y ago

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? [1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-instant-apps-evolving-apps.html http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-insta...

SwellJoe 10y ago
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.

dogma1138 10y ago

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.

cmdrfred 10y ago
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 $800+ dollars of hardware with me while I'm up in ceilings running cable. It allows me to spend my downtime writing code so I can get into development one day. I get over a full day on a single charge. Great little machine. I'd consider one of the premium ones for my next laptop.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  Yeah well you are a "unique" case, I would be surprised if even 10% of Chromebook owners knows what Crouton or chroot is :) HN users don't see Chromebooks because HN users are a very special subset - highly educated and well paid which works in development and IT at large. If you look at children and low wage blue collar workers you'll see many more of them those are the people that buy what one would not even consider a budget laptop but an entry one. Those are also the people for whom Google and Facebook are defacto the internet, I've recently met people that didn't knew "Office" even existed outside of Google Docs. If you are high school student that only wants to get access to Facebook and maybe be able to write a small paper you don't need more than a Chromebook. If you are a truck driver or a security guard that wants to be able to read email or watch YouTube you don't need more than a Chromebook. And for those people a 150-250$ 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.

spc476 10y ago

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). [1] That is, he makes all his income from his writing. https://seanhoade.wordpress.com/ https://seanhoade.wordpress.com/ Edit: added a bit of history. And a link in case anyone is interested in his books.