Chromebooks are going to take over.

While many of you hate Chromebooks, we think they are slowly taking over the market. To be fair Chromebooks have come a long way and are not E-Waste like tons of people still think they are. Be sure to let us know your thoughts on Chromebooks!

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:20 These things were terrible
3:10 Getting less terrible
6:35 That's a little better
9:29 Outro

[gavjlewis]

Picked up a cheap Chromebook that i honestly didn't need and thought i would use it for a few days and then it would get locked away and gather dust. I was so wrong. Its not a daily driver but it just sits on the coffee table and as soon as its needed its up and running in 5 seconds. The battery lasts longer than i can keep my eyes open in a day. Leave it on, no worries as soon as the screen goes to sleep it uses virtually zero power. It has a bright 1080p IPS panel and is plenty fast enough. Yes they keyboard isn't the best and neither is the trackpad and its all cheap plastic, but it cost £80 ($100). It also will get updates until 2030.

[votezoidberg]

You should have mentioned one of the biggest reasons which is that most schools had Office licensing and it was getting more and more expensive. So the logical step was the free Google workspace which existed for years and is still available to most edu's. Moving to Google cut down significantly on not just OS licensing but also word processing, spreadsheets, email, and presentation software's. Add in the Google forms and other education based software's that made assigning homework and in class work super easy and it was an amazing offering for an insanely low price for schools.

[hghmrp]

I am on my third chromebook. The first one was an original Cr-48 courtesy of Google itself. Most recent one is an Asus C302C. I have used thhem mostly as travel machines. Main disadvantage was the five year end of life limitation, but the new Chromebook Plus line with ten years of support has eliminated that issue. May the chromebook live long and productive!

[Brick_Soup]

My school gives everyone a Chromebook for general school stuff but we still have a computer lab full of dell optiplex PCs for specific computer related courses.

[jarencascino]

I had a chromebook in school and without knowing better I got one for college (because they were cheap). I made it work and 4 years later I’m still using it.

[compuguy]

I work in IT support and in the past couple of years a couple of nationwide retailers we support have transitioned to Chromebook boxes (not laptops). If some folks are learning to use Chromebooks at school, arguably a smaller but growing number are also getting exposure at work.

[ChrisPollard]

My mother-in-law is in her 70s and ALWAYS had issue with the dirt cheap Windows laptops she would get. A few years ago we bought her a 17" Chromebook (for the bigger screen) and it's been problem-free for her. Email, Facebook, some of the online games she plays all run just fine. And it was about $350. Chromebooks ARE the computer that most people actually need. The newer ones with upgradeable RAM, proper NVMe SSDs (also upgradeable), and i3/i5 processors shoud perform quite well for years to come. Especially compared to the absolute DOGS of eMMC cards they have been saddled with. Never get those. Ever.

[hasslehoffs]

4:18 my PTSD thought it was going to an ad

[RILDIGITAL]

The shift towards Chromebooks is more and more apparent. The strides Google has made with its OS over the years are truly commendable. And with the increasingly acceptable cloud applications, a substantial market acceptance can be expected in the upcoming years.

[jortand]

Back in 2018 my grandmother asked with help because she needed a computer for email and checking for baking / knitting stuff, I got her a chromebook. It's easy to set up all you need is a Google account, a thing basically every adult has with their email, the UI is perfectly simple for someone who hasn't used a computer before, and you don't need a very powerful computer to browse the internet. As far as I know, it's still going strong, and I'm planning to buy her a new chromebook at some point this year because nothing beats that price.

[sweh]

Maybe a decade ago I bought a $150 Chromebook; not for "daily driver" use but for when I was travelling (e.g. home for Christmas). All I needed for that was a web browser and ssh (so I could ssh back home). And at that price if it broke (eg while flying) then I wouldn't be too annoyed. It was a massive step up from the Asus netbooks (better display, keyboard, etc) and the Transformer android tablets (tablet+keyboard dock). Worked well!

[jackpowell]

We use this at work for "grab and go" devices for those who forget their macbook or if your device is being repaired etc. I also bought an older one for my mother from work as it was being replaced with newer ones. For her basic home needs its perfect, just needs google docs/sheets, browsing etc and all her android phone accounts etc were already there.

[robotredkitten]

I wish the school system in Canada was a bit more conscious of what they are doing. I think that schools should should prioritize FOSS cause whatever they do they will give someone a bit of a monopoly.

[scarecrw]

I both work with children who use chromebooks and use a pixelbook myself (in addition to a windows desktop). I'm certainly in a bit of a niche, but between my work using primarily online productivity tools and the ability to run linux/android apps, chromeOS is absolutely fine. Anything computationally intensive is done on my main PC anyways, so the weaker specs don't really factor into my use case.

As for students, the one gripe I have is that those administrative tools mean that student usage is *heavily* locked down. How you want your child/student to use their chromebook is a matter of personal opinion, but I'll offer one concern: the batch of students growing up with chromeOS is not going to develop the same tech skills that many previous generations were able to. I have never seen a student chromebook that enabled linux, and many have harsh restrictions on app downloads. The tech skills that I have today started from mucking around on school computers and that option just isn't available for most current students.

[raljix]

I've been a windows user since the 3.1 days - Picked up a Chromebook Plus a couple of days ago to give it a road test and boy is it a banging experience. Very impressive....

[antifreeze]

@7:36 I Scrambled to answer my discord just to find out no one was calling, that was WELL DONE!!

[ikuturso]

When most people use laptops only as "phone with keyboard and bigger screen" Chromebooks do really make sense. On the other hand a similar i3 pc laptop can be had for just $50 more which makes sense as well in many cases.

[savagepeng]

During the times of COVID-19, I frequently visited libraries. I owned a 17-inch Asus laptop that weighed over 3 kilograms with the adapter, and its battery lasted only 2 hours. Naturally, it was often difficult to find an available charging point in libraries, cafes, etc. Consequently, I contemplated purchasing a new laptop with a battery life of 8-10 hours at a reasonable price point. However, they were quite expensive, typically costing upwards of 800 euros. That's when I came across the Acer 314 Chromebook, priced at 250 euros at the time and promising an 8-hour battery life. As a computer engineering student, I decided to give it a try. It was used primarily for watching recorded lectures and programming. The Chromebook even featured a terminal for use. So I bought it and was thoroughly impressed. The battery consistently lasted more than 8 hours, and coding with "vim" in the terminal was a game-changer. Also, when I needed to charge it, I didn't bring the Chromebook charger; instead, I used a 25W Samsung fast charger, which worked quite well. I have since passed on my Chromebook to my brother, who is a teacher, and he is perfectly happy with it. So, indeed, Chromebooks are excellent products.

[torajp]

Installed latest flexOS on my panasonic Letsnote I picked up for 80 bucks here in Japan, and its amazing. Everything works perfectly out of the box too. Had put Windows 11 on it via registry hack, but it ran like a dog, even with 8GB of memory. This thing absolutely flies now.

[cardsfanbj]

I'm like 2 years younger than Linus and I remember 3rd grade we had a room full of DOS machines that I started learning to type on. Occasionally had a class learning, not even like a once a week thing.
Fourth grade on, we had one PC in our classroom with either 95 or 98. Not like at the teacher's desk, I forget what it was used for.
Eighth grade I got redistricted into a brand new school facility and we had an updated computer lab.
I went to a private high school and we had a good sized computer lab, divided in 2, one was a classroom and the other was open for students to use in their free period, and we also had a small bank of computers to use in the library. Except it was all Apple now. Most computers were G3s, but there were a couple G4's. School also had a couple of carts of iBook G4s for teachers to check out for their class to use for a day.
None of these classes I took actually taught me how to type fast. I knew how to type, but I learned to do it fast playing RuneScape. Selling ore or cooked fish on one of the market worlds, back before they released the Grand Exchange, you had to type fast and accurate if you wanted to successfully market your goods.