Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 256 posts

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#81

Post by yardie »

mixedmath wrote: post #67
yardie wrote: post #55

I'm curious, but is a Chromebook useful in offline mode? My family and I have been on sabbatical sailing half the planet so far. Internet has been a big headache as Iridium tops out at 2400bps. And data plans in developing countries and islands can be extremely expensive, up to $1/MB. I've found our android tablets to be more crashy offline as apps that can't get an internet connection go braindead, blank, or just ki…

The short answer is no. But if you are a bit confident in your Linux skills, then I would recommend looking into Crouton [1], which allows you to easily access a fully functional Linux. I'm not sure what you're after, but this is what I use, and it satisfies all my needs. [I mean, it's just a Linux laptop, but that's what I need]. [1]: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton

We're already running Debian onboard. Just wanted to see if ChromeOS would be more useful since schools are using it.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#82

Post by qubex »

_JamesA_ wrote: post #56
johansch wrote: post #21

Every current Mac laptop user: "Why the hell don't you release a retina macbook air? (A toy 'macbook' does not count.)

This current Mac laptop user bought a toy 'macbook' for portable development. It's replacing an aging MacBook Pro 17. I am running IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate and Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise (in a Windows 10 Fusion VM) without any issues. The lightweight portability and 12" retina screen are amazing.

I second this. I'm using a just-refreshed 12" Retina MacBook ‘toy’ (BTO m7/8GB/512GB) and it is an utterly perfect, ‘nervous’ little machine that suits my varied computing needs perfectly (local databases, spreadsheets, data exploration, symbolic mathematics in Mathematica, general productivity word-processing/email and assorted browsing & multimedia). This is a machine that deserves respect.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#83

Post by duaneb »

arcticfox wrote: post #13
duaneb wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow I don't think that their hardware is as much an issue as their price point. As a developer you'd still be a fool (or just loaded with elbow grease) to attempt developing with a chrome book.

Why? I've developed 100% on a cloud VM for years. All I need locally is a browser. Obviously wouldn't work for some things, but as a full stack developer: no problem.

If your internet connection sucks, or you need hardware access, or you're doing anything that requires a low latency, or you want to run the software locally for any reason, cloud VMs won't work. I can only imagine it working for a small subset of app developers. It's hardly a full stack solution.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#84

Post by vetinari »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #49
matheweis wrote: post #2

Not surprised ... Apple hasn't put out a laptop with up-to-date specs for years. I'm a lifelong Mac user and I'm unhappy with their current specs.

Their MacBook Pro line does have (and has had for some time) some of the best hardware available. Perhaps it doesn't match purpose-built gaming notebooks, and definitely not desktops, but they usually are the first to have a new Intel processor, have newish graphics hardware, pioneered mainstream PCIe storage and high-resolution displays...You might pay a lot for what you get, but there's no doubt it's good hardware.

MacBook Pro is one of the few notebook lines that doesn't have Intel Skylake CPUs and GPUs or NVMe SSD yet.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#85

Post by SwellJoe »

blazespin wrote: post #47
SwellJoe wrote: post #16

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…

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..

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.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#86

Post by SwellJoe »

pavlov wrote: post #75
SwellJoe wrote: post #16

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…

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 HT…

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.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#87

Post by nameless912 »

xenihn wrote: post #32
geofft wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gather that you're implying the primary purpose of Chromebooks is tracking users to deliver ads? Are users tracked any more on a Chromebook than a) a MacBook Air running Chrome b) a MacBook Air running Safari?

My answer to both is "I don't know, but probably". There's not really any way to know based on the current information I have access to.

So your answer is "I think so, therefore I assume so without any justification"?

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#88

Post by marssaxman »

SwellJoe wrote: post #86
pavlov wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 HT…

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 require…

The momentum comes from the massive overinvestment in network capacity made as a result of the dot-com bubble. Bandwidth doesn't scale like storage or processing capacity do, though, so I predict the current balance in favor of centralization will eventually reverse as the cost of shuttling data back and forth to the center once again comes to outweigh the cost of doing all the heavy lifting at the edges.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#89

Post by jdeibele »

A couple of weeks ago I bought an Airport Capsule for backups.

Thursday, I got the "your backup can't be verified" message, meaning that Apple threw away my backups. This is Apple product backing up to Apple product. I tried fixing it with fsck_hfs but it wasn't finished when I went to bed.

Today, I woke up and my MacBook Air is doing a nice loop where it lets me log in, then reboots. It's done that 10 times. I've tried resetting the PRAM, going single-user, logging in as a different user and finally re-installing the OS. Still doing it.

My wife and I have MacBook Airs and there's a shared Mac Mini in the family room. We got it mostly because the older kids needed Microsoft Office. It's attached to a 22" screen but is rarely used. The schools are using Google Docs and rarely print anything out.

My 3 kids love their Chromebooks. They use them for Youtube and reading fan fiction and things like that.

I'm typing this on a 2013 Chromebook Pixel which I bought off someone on Craigslist because I was curious to see what the build quality was like. My MacBook Air has been sucking wind with 4GB of memory and I've been waiting to see what the new MacBooks look like.

I take a lot of photos and I find that the Chromebook doesn't handle looking at 700 photos very well. But for 95% of what I do, the Pixel is better than the MBA. It's got bad battery life but then my MBA does, too. I had it hooked up to an external screen because I wanted more resolution and using the charger too much wrecked the battery.

Almost everything I want to do is shared online. I want my kids (and parents of other players/students) to have access to photos. I bought a family version of ARQ (highly recommended) because I wanted to do local data, physical off-site (at my mom's every couple of months), Airport Capsule and stored on Amazon's servers.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to re-invent things where I just use a Chromebook. Maybe I just use the Mac Mini for copying photos off SD cards to Flickr and onto a hard drive.

Anyway, point is that I don't think my kids will ever be very interested in spending their own money on a Mac even though they love their iPhones.

Re: Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

#90

Post by conail »

bluedino wrote: post #37

I'd be curious to see how long the lifetime is of a Chromebook compared to a MacBook

Forever. I'm happily using an original HP11 with no issues at all.

I bought it because I was spending most of my time in ssh/emacs and I wouldn't be too worried about losing a Chromebook. Three years later the joke's on me.

As others have noted, crouton is super and updates are seamless. I use it locally way more than I'd anticipated. IMO the standout feature is the keyboard.

Post reply on HN