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Chromebooks outsold Macs for the first time in the US

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

#131

Post by shirro »

I bought a cheap Chromebook to play with and for a lightweight disposable travel machine but ended up using it for programming/web development for a time. A nice secure reliable browser environment plus secure shell in combination with online services isn't perfect but it is doable.

They work better as a secondary device for power users but I suspect the number of people who can use them as a primary device isn't negligible and will increase as the platform matures.

I have mostly retired my Chromebook for a higher spec laptop running a full linux desktop. But I can see a lot of potential for Chromebooks and with some nicer models coming along with access to the Android store I can see them replacing both laptops and tablets for family.

They are secure, practical and low maintenance and I am not at all surprised that they have done well in education and I expect higher specced ones have a very good chance in enterprise.

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

#132

Post by millstone »

notacoward wrote: post #124
millstone wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crouton is a more real development machine than anything Apple ever made, because it's more like the server where you'll eventually deploy Well, this assumes one particular type of development! I would not choose a Chromebook to develop, say, Chrome! I tried Crouton a few years ago, wanting to run xbmc. Audio didn't work, because it required a newer version of the Linux kernel. It turns out you can't just install a…

Yes, and it would be fantastic to use a Mac or Windows box to debug something involving Linux kernel drivers, right? There will always be special cases. Sometimes there's only one solution, and you take what you can get within those parameters. I've worked on "one of this exists in the world" kinds of hardware a few times myself. Nonetheless, the "Chromebooks are for n00bs" meme is still BS. For the majority of peopl…

Developing software for something other than a Linux server is not some bizarre edge case. I was reacting to your unqualified claim that a Chromebook is "a more real development machine."

My "special needs" was running popular and well known Linux software. Many people in this thread have said that running Crouton on a Chromebook is just like having Ubuntu or Debian. But this is not so:

1. Google does not reliably update core software

2. It's harder to get help when things go wrong, because the system is sufficiently different from an ordinary Linux box

For those reasons, if you want to run Linux software, it's better to use a familiar Linux distribution, and not ChromeOS.

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

#133

Post by irascible »

ginkgotree wrote: post #128
j2kun wrote: post #104

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…

Couldn't agree more. It honestly still seems nuts to me that the browser hasn't taken over the whole OS experience. It's clear that locally installed software is going away. But it's happening on a system that was designed decades ago to request a single markup document, and return it in a single response. Obviously, the browser has matured. JavaScript has matured. We now have more protocols to work with than just HT…

Damn its refreshing to hear this.

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

#134

Post by themartorana »

ginkgotree wrote: post #128
j2kun wrote: post #104

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…

Couldn't agree more. It honestly still seems nuts to me that the browser hasn't taken over the whole OS experience. It's clear that locally installed software is going away. But it's happening on a system that was designed decades ago to request a single markup document, and return it in a single response. Obviously, the browser has matured. JavaScript has matured. We now have more protocols to work with than just HT…

Locally installed software is, if anything, more prevalent than ever before.

Let's put aside mobile for a minute that so changed the landscape towards locally installed that it put Google's revenue model on its heels.

You see WhatsApp, Slack, etc., releasing Electron apps just to try to appear locally installable. If there wasn't such a high demand for it, and people weren't clamoring for a stand-alone app instead of a browser tab, companies would never invest the time and money.

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

#135

Post by shirro »

partiallypro wrote: post #130

Does it bother no one else that this is so locked to the Google eco-system? Perhaps more than any other device on the market is locked to an eco-system, including Apple's iOS walled garden? I also fear that between this and iOS, we are starting to see a divide between production and consumption devices more than ever. I don't consider that a good trend.

Not really. Ideally you go into these things with your eyes open. I can see our house going from five heavily used Apple devices to zero in the next couple of years. If the barriers were as bad as people pretend we could not do that. It probably helps that I have an awareness of the issues involved and haven't bought in too heavily to the more restrictive services.

I likely will have to buy some of the kid's games again for Android but they have outgrown a lot and as they grow older anyway. Having a device with a keyboard that can run minecraft pe, or access the web or be used for school work, or run a linux chroot seems like a huge leap forward over iPads.

My Chromebook was surprisingly hackable and getting a shell is pretty trivial. You can easily live in a chroot on a model with better hardware. Sometimes selling a tiny bit of freedom or privacy for trivial entertainments or day to day practicality is a reasonable tradeoff.

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

#136

Post by jghn »

_JamesA_ wrote: post #127
jghn wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this one of the new macbooks? I'm strongly considering doing exactly this but figure at this point I might as well see what they have in store for MBP, or even MBA if they don't can the product line.

Yes, I have the 1st gen MacBook retina with 512GB 'flash storage' and the 1.3GHz CPU upgrade.

Thanks. Has there been anything where you actually miss the horsepower?

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

#137

Post by spb »

j2kun wrote: post #104

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…

Moreover, Chromebooks, when paired with a good cloud IDE like https://c9.io, are excellent for writing code - more so than any "traditional" OS, since the local system is only dedicating resources toward keeping the interface responsive, and not wasting them on background distractions like local search indexing or filesystem defragmentation. Meanwhile, if you accidentally forkbomb a cloud development server, your music player doesn't freeze in an endless sample loop at max volume, and if your battery dies, you don't lose your uncommitted in-buffer file changes. Driver updates never break your system's ability to connect to the network, and (with separate workspaces for separate projects) compilation never breaks due to the installation of a conflicting SDK version.

To be frank, I don't know how most developers can tolerate writing their code on anything else.

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

#138

Post by mattmcknight »

jrcii wrote: post #42
adpirz wrote: post #23

As someone who works in a K-12 setting, I'm not surprised. 1:1 chromebook initiatives are exploding across the country, and with it, a flurry of new edtech apps for K-12. At the end of the day, Chromebooks win over both iPads and Macbooks on price and functionality -- 21st century skills include being able to type and work your way around a computer. On top of that, Google's provisioning and management systems are so…

>Google's provisioning and management systems are so far the best So far my experience with that is trying to get an Active Directory server to sync with Google Apps for Education, for which they provide this tool: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6027781?hl=en It's beyond buggy, it's plain broken. It clearly hasn't been touched in years. I'm going to have to write the glue code myself.

Why do you have to use the school one? Isn't GADS enough? https://support.google.com/a/answer/1263028

If you really need to sync passwords, they have have GAPS. https://support.google.com/a/answer/2611859?hl=en

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

#139

Post by gizmo385 »

zobzu wrote: post #109
j2kun wrote: post #104

I think it's hilarious how little the HN community knows about Chromebooks. Every time it pops up, there's a wave of people saying "I don't know a single person who has one!" and "They seem useless without an internet connection!" and "I wonder how they compare to mac books." People forget that most of the world doesn't write code, and doesn't need native applications. They write email, take selfies, and write extrem…

it is actually an educational problem - specially in the US. Educated people will favor the more flexible operating systems to create things (don't think just programming, think video, pictures, whatever), dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email". That said the reality is that the majority of people are the ones that do not want to learn, and thus to be successful it is necessary to cater to them. It makes s…

> dumb people will care about "selfies" and "email"

You know smart people can prefer a simple, less-modifiable system as well, right? Just because they don't share the HN communities view for an open product doesn't make them less intelligent.

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

#140

Post by gizmo385 »

jalami wrote: post #123

As I've written earlier, ChromeOS doesn't interest me. It's a tightly locked down linux-y distro as a vector to peddle Google services. It's not complicated, it's very cheap and almost impossible to mess something up because it's so easy to wipe and all your data is on the cloud. That's the appeal and why they're booming in schools, but I find it dangerous for multiple reasons. I wrote at more length about it in yest…

> Sure, there's a kernel somewhere deep, but the userspace is locked-down, weak and anti-consumer.

I don't necessarily think that an operating system being locked down is equivalent to anti-consumer. For the vast majority of consumers, I think that opening up the full complexity of linux would just be too much hassle and not worth the gains.

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