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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

#181

Post by yesplorer »

kstenerud wrote: post #171

I had a chromebook for about a year. I tried to make it my main laptop. I really did. But online only apps just don't work for me (I'm not always close enough to an internet connection). The native apps weren't usable enough, and often froze the whole desktop. Crouton, while cool, is flaky. I never did get audio working on it, and it also froze the system once or twice a day. And the lack of local storage became prob…

That's interesting, and seems like a direct opposite for the experience I have with my Asus 13 inches chromebook. It is now my main laptop, I use it for days and it never freezes.

I have crouton on it and this comment was typed in firefox on crouton. Whenever I need to, I switch to Chrome OS to use Chrome. I had problem with getting audio to work in the beginning but to be fair that was around the same time I really didn't know how to switch between Crouton and Chrome OS.

It would do with more storage but I have a 32gig sd card in it which gives me a little more mileage than depending only on the internal storage.

Honestly the only REAL work I do on it is learning Javascript even though I got it specifically to learn PHP but things seem to require a lot of tweaking when installing PHP and even setting up ur webserver that I gave up and decided to learn Javascript, which only requires a browser. But I'm sure that's my problem with Linux and not Chromebook.

I have never had an "Ultrabook" before so I really enjoy the sleek nature of this and I don't think I'm going to ever buy any laptop bigger than this ever and the all day battery life makes it awesome.

Apart from the usage above, everything else is like your dad's though. Maybe crouton may have jx gotten better since your experience

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

#182

Post by khedoros »

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..

> and frankly any laptop nowadays without internet is pretty crippled.

Depends on what you keep locally on the machine =) I've generally got a bunch of DVD rips, a few dozen games, my dev environments, documentation for whatever I'm working on (API references and such), a bunch of ebooks...

My important data is on my local machine, and my irreplaceable data is backed up to the cloud. It's a very different paradigm of computing, compared to the people whose laptops are "crippled" without Internet.

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

#183

Post by conradev »

ekianjo wrote: post #175
lern_too_spel wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the comments under that post. Linus is not joking.

Indeed he's not joking, but then that means he changed his mind compared to what he says 1-2 years ago.

3 years ago: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd

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

#184

Post by marincounty »

ball_of_lint wrote: post #119
vilmosi wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not the new generation though

How about 19? That young enough?

I have a question for any under 20 year olds. What are likes/dislikes in current tech? I know it's a general question, but I'm honestly interested.

For instance, is a physical keyboard even necessary? Do you use FB? Apple, or Android phone? Contracts, or prepaid? Do you buy stuff from small websites? Or, is it just not worth the security risk? Does it bother you if a website demands a profile picture? Does the repairability of a electronic device matter? I'd appreciate any feedback.

I'm just curious. I'm not one of these rich guys trying to corner the next big trend. I'm pretty poor, but interested in tech., and would like to get a gauge on where it might be heading.

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

#186

Post by s_q_b »

ekianjo wrote: post #175
lern_too_spel wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the comments under that post. Linus is not joking.

Indeed he's not joking, but then that means he changed his mind compared to what he says 1-2 years ago.

Or he was joking. It's really hard to tell. I'm still not quite sure if git is an elaborate prank.

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

#187

Post by HappyTypist »

ekianjo wrote: post #155
ginkgotree wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's clear that locally installed software is going away Where performance matters, locally installed software is NOT going away anytime soon. Oh, just take gaming, for example. Good luck making AAA games run in your browser.

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/03/12/mozilla-and-epic-pr...

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

#188

Post by toss1941 »

greggman wrote: post #159
themartorana wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Who's clamoring for apps? AFAICT that's only the companies that want the apps because it lets them spy on their customers in more ways.

Any disk IO intensive application is going to run and/or scale very poorly as a webapp.

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

#189

Post by IndianAstronaut »

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…

Oddly enough, I learned Javascript on a Chromebook.

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

#190

Post by _0w8t »

khedoros wrote: post #152
spb wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products. The entire source tree for the OS (minus a few proprietary twigs like the Widevine Encryption Module for DRM on Netflix) is a publically-accessible Git repository, and all Chromebooks allow the user to put them into a Developer Mode, which removes the low-level restrictions the system normally runs userspace in to ensure stability and security. Contrasted with…

> Not to mention Chromebooks essentially are open products. The OS itself is pretty open. If I'm not mistaken though, if you put it into dev mode, you get a scary screen at every reboot, and an opportunity to hit space to re-enable OS verification, and apparently wipe out whatever modifications you've made to the system. In theory, actually rebooting the system should be a fairly rare event, but that's one of the rea…

At least some Chromebooks allow to install a custom bootloader that does not show the scary warning through simple hardware tinkering like [1]. I think this is a good compromise from security perspective.

[1] - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eGPMu03vCxIO0a3oNX8H...

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