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more capable yes, but are they good enough? for most college students (excluding CS,IT, Engineering etc)i would say yes and like someone said 4 Chromebooks for

more capable yes, but are they good enough? for most college students (excluding CS,IT, Engineering etc)i would say yes and like someone said 4 Chromebooks for the price of 1 macbook. from what i have done with Google Apps and Chromebooks, i would say the chromebook is probably a better fit out of the box for this use case than a Macbook.

rayiner 14y ago
Not having MS Office is a dealbreaker. It's not a matter of being able to do what you need on Google Docs, it's lack of perfect MS Office compatibility with back/forth revisions, track changes, etc. Also, why exclude engineering? Drexel has pretty big engineering, science, and math departments. And I'd imagine some of the softer majors like business, accounting, etc, still need their own software.
- jaredsohn 14y ago
  > why exclude engineering? I think the grandparent post was saying that engineering students (as well as those for other named disciplines) may have a need for non-webbased software that a Chromebook wouldn't adequately satisfy.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Right. My point is that they use the library too.
    - ericcumbee 14y ago
      I'm not saying use chrome books exclusively, buy chromebooks for the english 1101 term papers and macbooks for engineers. so instead of buying 2 macbooks, you've bought 4 chromebooks and a macbook for the same price.
- ericcumbee 14y ago
  how many people actually use those features though? i never did in 4 1/2 years getting a Bs of IT. a chromebook is not going to work for everyone. but for the vast majority of library work it will do just fine. would i want to write my Senior Capstone project on it? No. but English 1101, 1102 essays and term papers sure.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Every group project will involve passing Word documents/sections thereof back and forth and less than perfect compatibility is a huge pain when you're doing that. Also, using track changes is very common these days for professors returning comments on drafts.
ghshephard 14y ago
I guess a lot depends on the Applications that the students want to use. My understanding is the ChromeBook is more web app focussed (though it does have the ability to run some local apps) - but the MacBook could have the full suite of 40-50 apps that a student might want to use loaded on the Mac. I was a student technician in our Micro Computer Facility at SFU, and we had Windows, Macintosh Facilities - and each one of them had a _ton_ of instructor provided applications, course-directed application, and department provided applications, in addition to the standard Word Processing/Graphics/Spreadsheet/Stats/Graphing packages. I have to believe that as Bandwidth (Hello 802.11ac!) and device performance improves, the pendulum will swing back to web apps again. Still 3-5 years early for that though.

rayiner 14y ago

Not having MS Office is a dealbreaker. It's not a matter of being able to do what you need on Google Docs, it's lack of perfect MS Office compatibility with back/forth revisions, track changes, etc. Also, why exclude engineering? Drexel has pretty big engineering, science, and math departments. And I'd imagine some of the softer majors like business, accounting, etc, still need their own software.

jaredsohn 14y ago
> why exclude engineering? I think the grandparent post was saying that engineering students (as well as those for other named disciplines) may have a need for non-webbased software that a Chromebook wouldn't adequately satisfy.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Right. My point is that they use the library too.
  - ericcumbee 14y ago
    I'm not saying use chrome books exclusively, buy chromebooks for the english 1101 term papers and macbooks for engineers. so instead of buying 2 macbooks, you've bought 4 chromebooks and a macbook for the same price.
ericcumbee 14y ago
how many people actually use those features though? i never did in 4 1/2 years getting a Bs of IT. a chromebook is not going to work for everyone. but for the vast majority of library work it will do just fine. would i want to write my Senior Capstone project on it? No. but English 1101, 1102 essays and term papers sure.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Every group project will involve passing Word documents/sections thereof back and forth and less than perfect compatibility is a huge pain when you're doing that. Also, using track changes is very common these days for professors returning comments on drafts.

ghshephard 14y ago

I guess a lot depends on the Applications that the students want to use. My understanding is the ChromeBook is more web app focussed (though it does have the ability to run some local apps) - but the MacBook could have the full suite of 40-50 apps that a student might want to use loaded on the Mac. I was a student technician in our Micro Computer Facility at SFU, and we had Windows, Macintosh Facilities - and each one of them had a _ton_ of instructor provided applications, course-directed application, and department provided applications, in addition to the standard Word Processing/Graphics/Spreadsheet/Stats/Graphing packages. I have to believe that as Bandwidth (Hello 802.11ac!) and device performance improves, the pendulum will swing back to web apps again. Still 3-5 years early for that though.