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I don't understand why people buy expensive Chromebooks - the author's Samsung device seems to cost $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic

I don't understand why people buy expensive Chromebooks - the author's Samsung device seems to cost $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic configuration Macbook Air M1 (8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD) can be bought for $899 new with education discount; if you're lucky, you can also buy a Thinkpad X13 at similar prices.

Syonyk 5y ago
It depends on the Chromebook, but having owned a personal Chromebook Pixel of the first two generations, it's because, the Pixel at least, represented something that I couldn't find anywhere else. In no particular order: * We MUST MAKE MORE 3:2 screens. Content is not wide, except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web. * I've done computer security stuff for a while. Chromebooks are, by far, the best computer security model I've seen. Trusted boot, hashed root filesystems, fast updates that are as painless as possible (they even keep entered text in textareas on pages). They are, by default, secure enough that I would log into my core accounts on someone else's Chromebook (given a fresh reboot to ensure it wasn't in developer mode - physical firmware attacks aren't in the scope of things I worry about from people I know). Yet, I can twiddle a few keys and get one to be a properly nice Linux laptop with all sorts of great features, that also manages to "just work." * OS resolution scaling is amazing. Eyes tired at the end of a day? A keystroke or two and you've rescaled the entire UI to match. Throw in the super high res, high def modes on the high DPI screens, and it's good for just about anything. * Almost everything can be done on the web today, even if one probably shouldn't. I've used them as primary computers for many years, and I only rarely ran into something that I couldn't do (or couldn't do with Crouton and a Linux chroot environment). Those things included "a handful of Windows applications" (wine covers a lot) and "some kernel interfaces for Linux Internals classes" (the kernel simply lacks things that the OS doesn't need). I know it's popular to hate Chromebooks, but if you're willing to toss them in developer mode for a few things, the value you get for your money, even at the high end, is legitimately impressive.
- canadianfella 5y ago
  > except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web. You say humans, but you mean you and the other 3 people that “don’t watch video”.
- salawat 5y ago
  Give me an SSD and an OS distro on a thumb drive with USB3.0 support, and you get the same guarantees computer security-wise on literally any UEFI secure boot enabled system. Fast updates are enabled by heavily locking in what user's are able to do with them. No exotic checks to be done. I am not impressed by Chromebooks in those regards at all. Different strokes I suppose. I might give you the screen, but to be honest, most of the time Chromebooks find their way to me it's because they're broken, and I'm everybody's computer guy of last resort due to high tolerance for frustration. All of them have had their screens or MOBO's rendered inoperable. Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media. Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If I can't get my code to the processor that needs to run it without hostage negotiations, then that is not a useful machine to me. That is a niche PoS. Which all power to those who need it as such. Just isn't high on my list of things to actively purchase.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    > Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media. But they're not. You can, with the proper incantations of "fiddling keys you can't do remotely," boot anything you want on them. Just disable the secure boot stuff, which is a designed in, required feature for a Chromebook, and run whatever. > Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If you let a computer, connected to the internet, run any code that is sent its way, it will eventually run mostly malware. Probably foreign, and while well behaved, still quite unwelcome.
    - 5y ago
Maxburn 5y ago
This. For a while I did the Chromebook thing and it was actually pretty nice running android apps on it along with chrome OS but just kept slamming into chrome limitations. Looked at all the hoops necessary to sideload or try linux stuff and noped out to a regular X1 carbon thinkpad. Common Linux distros on a regular laptop is so much easier.
- tedk-42 5y ago
  Battery life on linux laptops are always bad. Unless you want to try a bunch of custom hacks that could break things in the future for you (when you update) in the name of saving battery... It's the last thing that's stopped me from using linux on a laptop day to day. A macbook is far superior for mobile needs (though more pricey) and I can justify a linux desktop for my day-to-day development activities because it's plugged into the power.
  - dcm360 5y ago
    Battery life depends a lot on which laptop you buy. With an old Elitebook Revolve with an Intel 5200U and a new Envy X360 with an AMD 4700U the battery life on Linux is about the same when compared to reviews on Windows. Especially the Envy has some issues with running Linux, but battery life isn't one of them.
    - tedk-42 5y ago
      Interesting - i haven't heard about the battery life performance of the new AMD chips and linux. I might have a go after all!
wearywanderer 5y ago
I bought the original Chromebook Pixel when it was new for something like $1.3k. At the time, I believed this the best way to get a slim laptop with a high resolution screen and good linux support. Debian did run well on it, as I expected, but I soon came to regret the purchase and will never buy hardware from Google again. EDIT: It lost audio about 3 or 4 months after it was out of warranty, both out of the speakers and headphone jack. Left speaker failed first, then the right, then the headphone jack. I can only assume it was some sort of hardware fault, since sound no longer worked in ChromeOS either (and HDMI audio continued working in both). But good fucking luck getting such a thing fixed on a product like that from a company like that. Now I have a Dell XPS with a 1080p screen, which is good enough, particularly considering Dell has a much better reputation for support/repairs.
- thekyle 5y ago
  Why did you regret the purchase?
  - wearywanderer 5y ago
    My edit includes some details. Basically, the warranty was too short and when audio (except HDMI out) broke, I couldn't get it fixed. There was also the matter of the secure boot nonsense, where if you press the wrong key on boot, secure mode would be re-enabled. With secure boot re-enabled, the only image that would boot would be a ChromeOS installation image, which would wipe your linux install. So you couldn't re-flip that secure boot bit without losing your linux installation. This bit me once, before I got better about regular backups..
- discordance 5y ago
  My chromebook pixel from 2013 stopped receiving OS updates a few years ago. My MacBook Pro from 2012 still receives updates and works a charm.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
3:2 aspect ratio screens are amazing for productivity, and sadly very rare outside top end chromebooks Chromebooks are just polished Gentoo linux machines too that don't have nightmare headaches of driver incompatiblity issues. A M1 macbook would have to run linux in a VM (even docker containers) and deal with the overhead/tax of that issue. A chromebook will just run chroot/container stuff against the native kernel with very little overhead and maximum access to the machine's available memory.
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  For a lot of use cases there's no need to boot a Linux VM, since you have a perfectly fine Unix already (though you have to fiddle with the security settings so macOS Big Sur becomes less annoying). Of course, it's a matter of taste and use case if you prefer one of the Linux package managers to homebrew or MacPorts. I use Macports, which still has some problems with more exotic packages on the M1, but in general seems to be running fairly well. But then, I'm used to compile my own software (such as exotic cross-compilers) and fix compilation problems when I need it. Docker containers are problematic, of course, and I often wondered why macOS never implemented functionality similar to FreeBSD Jails or Solaris Zones. I see both as superior approaches compared to Docker, especially if you can combine them with ZFS. The overhead for running VMs on a M1 Mac seems to be pretty reasonable, though, at least when you buy the 16 GB RAM version (though I also think it's overkill for something like Docker). Apple's hypervisor framework seems to work well and provides standard VirtIO devices to the guest OS, so many popular guest OSes that run on other virtualization solutions should be easy to adapt. The limited RAM expansion capabilities of the M1 Macs is probably the most problematic thing for these use cases.
blagie 5y ago
Well, my experience is that in practice, older refurb high-end Chromebooks can be had song. Chromebooks expire, losing security updates, and buying an older model is almost always a bad deal. Figuring out expiration dates is a PITA. In practice, COVID19 shortages aside, they typically carry very low resale value. If you're running Linux, you don't care. A rather premium model can be had for under $200 easily. That's cheap enough that you can do things with it that you'd never do with a real laptop.
makeitdouble 5y ago
It’s an Acer spin 13 and not a Samsung, but the 16G price seems to be in the same 700$ range. For the Macbook Air, the 16G version starts at 1079$ with education discount so roughly 1.5 more expensive (they explicitely choose the 16G version of the ACER, so the RAM shouldn’t be ignored IMO) The thinkpad X13 at 16G of RAM is around 1380$ on amazon [0], so twice as much. I don’t know the Acer spin 13, but if the screen is as good as Samsung’s one, it is well worth the price, especially as you usually get more battery life, and the chrome OS + android + linux mix is actually good. There are still rough edges, but the good parts largely outweigh those. [0](https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Notebook/dp/B089GVNT9Q/ref=sr_1_4?crid=32SCL4DDYOI37&dchild=1&keywords=thinkpad+x13&qid=1623628437&sprefix=thinkpad+x13%2Caps%2C323&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Noteb...)
- johndoe0815 5y ago
  Oops, Acer, correct (that was also the price I looked up), thanks for the correction. The 16 GB version of the Macbook Air is more expensive, but I wonder how much more RAM a Chromebook needs for similar tasks since most of the software runs in Chrome instead of native? I don't know US Thinkpad prices in detail, but you can buy the 16 GB RAM/512 GB SSD Thinkpad X13 AMD (no OS) for 1025 Eur (edu discount) including 19% VAT in Germany (https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-amd-campus.html https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-a...). This makes 861 Eur before tax (US$1042 at current conversion rates). Of course, in the end it's all a matter of taste and use case and I'm happy to see more variety in the personal computing market.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    For the RAM use, I also think a 8Gb M1 MBA would be fine for most people, including the OP if they stay within the confine of the OS. Now, in CS we're one of the edge cases where booting VMs and parallel systems is part of the deal. In the Chromebook configuration it's actually 3 systems running at the same time so more RAM has a direct impact on performance. (point taken on the Thinkpad price, I also think if we settle on a refurbished Chromebook, we could so the same for the Thinkpad and perhaps get it a bit lower)
esalman 5y ago
I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU. So the question is, can you get through the Master's program with a brand new $250 chromeook? I'd say yes- you basically need to set it up as a remote coding machine. Georgia Tech (and most other universities with decent graduate programs) provide access to educational and research computing clusters these days. Also, Google Collab is your friend, especially during the assignment deadlines when those clusters will be occupied by other students.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  >I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU. A laptop with a DGPU within that price range is mostly a NVIDIA MX-series GPU. But you can get a good NVIDIA GPU with the Acer Nitro 5 (from 2020 and upwards) series and maybe an Ideapad gaming.
p1necone 5y ago
As long as I can run Linux easily, edit/compile smallish code projects and watch Youtube smoothly CPU/GPU/RAM specs don't matter a whole lot for me when it comes to a laptop - I've got a beefy desktop at home for that (and I could remote into it from the laptop too). However battery life, ruggedness, 3:2 display, small size etc (note: not thickness, I don't actually care about that, just the other dimensions so it easily fits in a backpack) are all features I do look for in a laptop, and Chromebooks usually have that in spades (stuff that's intended to be handed out to high school kids is probably pretty indestructible). If Apple releases an 11" MacBook Air for a reasonable price that would be pretty compelling for me too though, knowing I do have the processing power should want it (and the very high dpi display).
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
So with an education discount, you can spent $200 more for half the RAM? Maybe if you need the disk space (although if it's replaceable, $200 will buy a lot of aftermarket SSD), but that's certainly not an obvious tradeoff to me.
sologoub 5y ago
Chromebooks frequently go on crazy sales - bought my 8Gb/i5 Acer Spin 713 for less than $500. As work machine it’s perfect for me and is also disposable if something were to happen to it. Linux support rounds out what I need, though it’s not perfect for GUI tools.
lrem 5y ago
I have a hefty budget for personal computing. My current laptop cost me almost 2400USD equivalent. The only reason that's not a Pixelbook is that Chrome doesn't run real Lightroom.
pwdisswordfish8 5y ago
> $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic configuration Macbook Air M1 (8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD) can be bought for $899 new with education discount This is an odd comment. Imagine I walked up to you, asked if you were happy with your computer, you said yes, and then I proceeded to try to "sell" you on an "upgrade" to half the RAM for the same price. Now consider if we weren't talking about the same price; I'm suggesting that you spend an extra $200+ on this. Why would anyone take that deal?
swebs 5y ago
Didn't Apple make it extremely difficult to boot Linux on modern Macbooks?

Syonyk 5y ago

It depends on the Chromebook, but having owned a personal Chromebook Pixel of the first two generations, it's because, the Pixel at least, represented something that I couldn't find anywhere else. In no particular order: * We MUST MAKE MORE 3:2 screens. Content is not wide, except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web. * I've done computer security stuff for a while. Chromebooks are, by far, the best computer security model I've seen. Trusted boot, hashed root filesystems, fast updates that are as painless as possible (they even keep entered text in textareas on pages). They are, by default, secure enough that I would log into my core accounts on someone else's Chromebook (given a fresh reboot to ensure it wasn't in developer mode - physical firmware attacks aren't in the scope of things I worry about from people I know). Yet, I can twiddle a few keys and get one to be a properly nice Linux laptop with all sorts of great features, that also manages to "just work." * OS resolution scaling is amazing. Eyes tired at the end of a day? A keystroke or two and you've rescaled the entire UI to match. Throw in the super high res, high def modes on the high DPI screens, and it's good for just about anything. * Almost everything can be done on the web today, even if one probably shouldn't. I've used them as primary computers for many years, and I only rarely ran into something that I couldn't do (or couldn't do with Crouton and a Linux chroot environment). Those things included "a handful of Windows applications" (wine covers a lot) and "some kernel interfaces for Linux Internals classes" (the kernel simply lacks things that the OS doesn't need). I know it's popular to hate Chromebooks, but if you're willing to toss them in developer mode for a few things, the value you get for your money, even at the high end, is legitimately impressive.

canadianfella 5y ago
> except video which I don't watch. Content is vertical. A 3:2 screen makes for an amazing laptop shape that is very well suited to the way humans view content, especially on the web. You say humans, but you mean you and the other 3 people that “don’t watch video”.
salawat 5y ago
Give me an SSD and an OS distro on a thumb drive with USB3.0 support, and you get the same guarantees computer security-wise on literally any UEFI secure boot enabled system. Fast updates are enabled by heavily locking in what user's are able to do with them. No exotic checks to be done. I am not impressed by Chromebooks in those regards at all. Different strokes I suppose. I might give you the screen, but to be honest, most of the time Chromebooks find their way to me it's because they're broken, and I'm everybody's computer guy of last resort due to high tolerance for frustration. All of them have had their screens or MOBO's rendered inoperable. Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media. Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If I can't get my code to the processor that needs to run it without hostage negotiations, then that is not a useful machine to me. That is a niche PoS. Which all power to those who need it as such. Just isn't high on my list of things to actively purchase.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > Further, I philosophically reject anything that cannot be side loaded or is so locked down you can't load software onto it from external media. But they're not. You can, with the proper incantations of "fiddling keys you can't do remotely," boot anything you want on them. Just disable the secure boot stuff, which is a designed in, required feature for a Chromebook, and run whatever. > Yes, security people may love that, but in reality, the entire point of processors is to run code. If you let a computer, connected to the internet, run any code that is sent its way, it will eventually run mostly malware. Probably foreign, and while well behaved, still quite unwelcome.
  - 5y ago

Maxburn 5y ago

This. For a while I did the Chromebook thing and it was actually pretty nice running android apps on it along with chrome OS but just kept slamming into chrome limitations. Looked at all the hoops necessary to sideload or try linux stuff and noped out to a regular X1 carbon thinkpad. Common Linux distros on a regular laptop is so much easier.

tedk-42 5y ago
Battery life on linux laptops are always bad. Unless you want to try a bunch of custom hacks that could break things in the future for you (when you update) in the name of saving battery... It's the last thing that's stopped me from using linux on a laptop day to day. A macbook is far superior for mobile needs (though more pricey) and I can justify a linux desktop for my day-to-day development activities because it's plugged into the power.
- dcm360 5y ago
  Battery life depends a lot on which laptop you buy. With an old Elitebook Revolve with an Intel 5200U and a new Envy X360 with an AMD 4700U the battery life on Linux is about the same when compared to reviews on Windows. Especially the Envy has some issues with running Linux, but battery life isn't one of them.
  - tedk-42 5y ago
    Interesting - i haven't heard about the battery life performance of the new AMD chips and linux. I might have a go after all!

wearywanderer 5y ago

I bought the original Chromebook Pixel when it was new for something like $1.3k. At the time, I believed this the best way to get a slim laptop with a high resolution screen and good linux support. Debian did run well on it, as I expected, but I soon came to regret the purchase and will never buy hardware from Google again. EDIT: It lost audio about 3 or 4 months after it was out of warranty, both out of the speakers and headphone jack. Left speaker failed first, then the right, then the headphone jack. I can only assume it was some sort of hardware fault, since sound no longer worked in ChromeOS either (and HDMI audio continued working in both). But good fucking luck getting such a thing fixed on a product like that from a company like that. Now I have a Dell XPS with a 1080p screen, which is good enough, particularly considering Dell has a much better reputation for support/repairs.

thekyle 5y ago
Why did you regret the purchase?
- wearywanderer 5y ago
  My edit includes some details. Basically, the warranty was too short and when audio (except HDMI out) broke, I couldn't get it fixed. There was also the matter of the secure boot nonsense, where if you press the wrong key on boot, secure mode would be re-enabled. With secure boot re-enabled, the only image that would boot would be a ChromeOS installation image, which would wipe your linux install. So you couldn't re-flip that secure boot bit without losing your linux installation. This bit me once, before I got better about regular backups..
discordance 5y ago
My chromebook pixel from 2013 stopped receiving OS updates a few years ago. My MacBook Pro from 2012 still receives updates and works a charm.

qbasic_forever 5y ago

3:2 aspect ratio screens are amazing for productivity, and sadly very rare outside top end chromebooks Chromebooks are just polished Gentoo linux machines too that don't have nightmare headaches of driver incompatiblity issues. A M1 macbook would have to run linux in a VM (even docker containers) and deal with the overhead/tax of that issue. A chromebook will just run chroot/container stuff against the native kernel with very little overhead and maximum access to the machine's available memory.

johndoe0815 5y ago
For a lot of use cases there's no need to boot a Linux VM, since you have a perfectly fine Unix already (though you have to fiddle with the security settings so macOS Big Sur becomes less annoying). Of course, it's a matter of taste and use case if you prefer one of the Linux package managers to homebrew or MacPorts. I use Macports, which still has some problems with more exotic packages on the M1, but in general seems to be running fairly well. But then, I'm used to compile my own software (such as exotic cross-compilers) and fix compilation problems when I need it. Docker containers are problematic, of course, and I often wondered why macOS never implemented functionality similar to FreeBSD Jails or Solaris Zones. I see both as superior approaches compared to Docker, especially if you can combine them with ZFS. The overhead for running VMs on a M1 Mac seems to be pretty reasonable, though, at least when you buy the 16 GB RAM version (though I also think it's overkill for something like Docker). Apple's hypervisor framework seems to work well and provides standard VirtIO devices to the guest OS, so many popular guest OSes that run on other virtualization solutions should be easy to adapt. The limited RAM expansion capabilities of the M1 Macs is probably the most problematic thing for these use cases.

blagie 5y ago

Well, my experience is that in practice, older refurb high-end Chromebooks can be had song. Chromebooks expire, losing security updates, and buying an older model is almost always a bad deal. Figuring out expiration dates is a PITA. In practice, COVID19 shortages aside, they typically carry very low resale value. If you're running Linux, you don't care. A rather premium model can be had for under $200 easily. That's cheap enough that you can do things with it that you'd never do with a real laptop.

makeitdouble 5y ago

It’s an Acer spin 13 and not a Samsung, but the 16G price seems to be in the same 700$ range. For the Macbook Air, the 16G version starts at 1079$ with education discount so roughly 1.5 more expensive (they explicitely choose the 16G version of the ACER, so the RAM shouldn’t be ignored IMO) The thinkpad X13 at 16G of RAM is around 1380$ on amazon [0], so twice as much. I don’t know the Acer spin 13, but if the screen is as good as Samsung’s one, it is well worth the price, especially as you usually get more battery life, and the chrome OS + android + linux mix is actually good. There are still rough edges, but the good parts largely outweigh those. [0](https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Notebook/dp/B089GVNT9Q/ref=sr_1_4?crid=32SCL4DDYOI37&dchild=1&keywords=thinkpad+x13&qid=1623628437&sprefix=thinkpad+x13%2Caps%2C323&sr=8-4 https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-20T2003YUS-13-3-Noteb...)

johndoe0815 5y ago
Oops, Acer, correct (that was also the price I looked up), thanks for the correction. The 16 GB version of the Macbook Air is more expensive, but I wonder how much more RAM a Chromebook needs for similar tasks since most of the software runs in Chrome instead of native? I don't know US Thinkpad prices in detail, but you can buy the 16 GB RAM/512 GB SSD Thinkpad X13 AMD (no OS) for 1025 Eur (edu discount) including 19% VAT in Germany (https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-amd-campus.html https://www.lapstars.de/thinkpad-campus/x-serie-campus/x13-a...). This makes 861 Eur before tax (US$1042 at current conversion rates). Of course, in the end it's all a matter of taste and use case and I'm happy to see more variety in the personal computing market.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  For the RAM use, I also think a 8Gb M1 MBA would be fine for most people, including the OP if they stay within the confine of the OS. Now, in CS we're one of the edge cases where booting VMs and parallel systems is part of the deal. In the Chromebook configuration it's actually 3 systems running at the same time so more RAM has a direct impact on performance. (point taken on the Thinkpad price, I also think if we settle on a refurbished Chromebook, we could so the same for the Thinkpad and perhaps get it a bit lower)

esalman 5y ago

I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU. So the question is, can you get through the Master's program with a brand new $250 chromeook? I'd say yes- you basically need to set it up as a remote coding machine. Georgia Tech (and most other universities with decent graduate programs) provide access to educational and research computing clusters these days. Also, Google Collab is your friend, especially during the assignment deadlines when those clusters will be occupied by other students.

MonaroVXR 5y ago
>I agree. In fact if I chose a chromebook, I'd automatically restrict the budget to $250 max even for a brand new one. For $950 or more, I wouldn't accept anything less than a performance laptop with a discrete GPU. A laptop with a DGPU within that price range is mostly a NVIDIA MX-series GPU. But you can get a good NVIDIA GPU with the Acer Nitro 5 (from 2020 and upwards) series and maybe an Ideapad gaming.

p1necone 5y ago

As long as I can run Linux easily, edit/compile smallish code projects and watch Youtube smoothly CPU/GPU/RAM specs don't matter a whole lot for me when it comes to a laptop - I've got a beefy desktop at home for that (and I could remote into it from the laptop too). However battery life, ruggedness, 3:2 display, small size etc (note: not thickness, I don't actually care about that, just the other dimensions so it easily fits in a backpack) are all features I do look for in a laptop, and Chromebooks usually have that in spades (stuff that's intended to be handed out to high school kids is probably pretty indestructible). If Apple releases an 11" MacBook Air for a reasonable price that would be pretty compelling for me too though, knowing I do have the processing power should want it (and the very high dpi display).

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

So with an education discount, you can spent $200 more for half the RAM? Maybe if you need the disk space (although if it's replaceable, $200 will buy a lot of aftermarket SSD), but that's certainly not an obvious tradeoff to me.

sologoub 5y ago

Chromebooks frequently go on crazy sales - bought my 8Gb/i5 Acer Spin 713 for less than $500. As work machine it’s perfect for me and is also disposable if something were to happen to it. Linux support rounds out what I need, though it’s not perfect for GUI tools.

lrem 5y ago

I have a hefty budget for personal computing. My current laptop cost me almost 2400USD equivalent. The only reason that's not a Pixelbook is that Chrome doesn't run real Lightroom.

pwdisswordfish8 5y ago

> $699 refurbished (16 GB RAM/128 GB SSD). To compare, a basic configuration Macbook Air M1 (8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD) can be bought for $899 new with education discount This is an odd comment. Imagine I walked up to you, asked if you were happy with your computer, you said yes, and then I proceeded to try to "sell" you on an "upgrade" to half the RAM for the same price. Now consider if we weren't talking about the same price; I'm suggesting that you spend an extra $200+ on this. Why would anyone take that deal?

swebs 5y ago

Didn't Apple make it extremely difficult to boot Linux on modern Macbooks?