Friday, June 29, 2018

Everything You Knew About Chromebooks Is Wrong

Mike Elgan:

Today, the best new Chromebooks can runs apps from three additional operating systems.

Not only do Chromebooks run apps, but they run more apps without dual- or multi-booting than any other computing platform. Chromebooks can run apps from Android, Linux and Windows concurrently in the same session.

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Now that Chromebooks are getting far better and easier for running Linux, Google is explicitly promoting Chromebooks as a development platform.

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A huge number of major cloud services, especially Google ones such as Docs and Gmail, offer easy offline modes. The Chrome Web Store is packed with free extensions that give you offline capability.

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Yes, some low-end Chromebooks are very cheap. But the powerful new generation is more comparable to a normal laptop.

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The hardware you get for the money is often rather substantial. A few years ago I got a refurb Acer Chromebook for ~$180, and it had a Broadwell CPU, 15" screen with an IPS panel, 32GB flash storage, and 4GB RAM. The bottom case comes off with a few screws and the storage is a standard M.2 slot, so I upgraded to a 256GB SSD for ~$50, then put Windows on it to do Windows things.

[…] Everything You Knew About Chromebooks Is Wrong, Chrome OS Is Getting Linux App […]

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