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I got my wife a chromebook a few years ago to replace her mbp that died unexpectedly right when she needed a laptop. I figured she would use it for a while and
by mattzito 3y ago
I got my wife a chromebook a few years ago to replace her mbp that died unexpectedly right when she needed a laptop. I figured she would use it for a while and then we would get her a new Mac and hand-down the chromebook to one of the kids.
Almost five years later, though, she's still using it and loves it. She uses it for everything, doesn't play games or need to run heavy compute locally, and now that Docs and Sheets can open Office documents natively (as opposed to conversion, which it used to do), there's really nothing she needs beyond that.
Recently I mentioned that the new Macs that had come out had a great battery life/performance profile and did she want to switch back - and she had little interest in it. They're pretty capable machines for general purpose use.
That's anecdata, of course, but if I think back to setting my grandmother up with a mac mini many years ago, if I were doing that today I would absolutely get her a chromebook for the security and data reliability alone.
- paxys 3y agoA $300 Chromebook is more than enough for 90%+ of the population, but it's really the marketing that gets them to spend 5-10x as much on fancier hardware. No one needs an M2 Max chip to browse Facebook/Reddit and write Google docs.
- mattzito 3y agoSelf-replying because I did think of something that is an annoyance, which is the lack of iMessage/Messages support on the chromebook. We have iphones, so we can still communicate with each other, but I get my messages on my mac laptop, which helps me see high priority stuff while working, and she doesn't. Annoyance, not a deal-breaker.
- seabrookmx 3y agoChromebooks do have that integration with the Google Messages app on Android though, unsurprisingly. +1 on it being a really nice quality of life feature.
- hotnfresh 3y agoCareful with giving Chromebooks to the elderly. As someone used to macs, I found my dad’s Chromebook (given to him by one of my siblings) to have astonishingly limited and poorly-functioning accessibility settings. IDK maybe they’ve gotten better, but at least 2-3 years ago they were unimpressive on that front, certainly.