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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

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.
khedoros 10y ago
> 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.

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.

khedoros 10y ago

> 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.