> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks
Use case scenario that it fills perfectly for me: I'll spend a lot of evenings on my back porch streaming local sports or Youtube.
The short math on my last refurbished Chromebook would have been cents per hour of use I got out of it.
Battery life: Granted I'm using the screen at it's lowest possible (stock) brightness in my scenario, but I get at the very least 6 hours per charge on a 17" display.
If something catastrophic were to happen to it I'm more than happy to replace a ~$100 piece of hardware that's serving one dedicated function for me, and there's 0 data of consequence that I'd be losing. And it's sustained light amounts of rain with no side effects.
> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything, in fact it's worse, since browsers are usually heavier than real apps.
If by "Save on anything" you mean saving files, you are completely wrong.
There is a filesystem that you can save any data to. If you use the Linux VM you can run nearly any typical Linux software (including any of the in vogue coding agents). You can even run llama.cpp or ollama with GPU acceleration, though you might be constrained by the laptop level GPU and Memory constraints.
There are completely offline apps and tools available (via Android, Linux, and even offline PWAs).
You can even write your own apps and run them only locally on the any of the above 3 runtimes.
Of course, I wouldn't do these on a school-specced Chromebook that costs $200, but $700 Chromebook would easily suffice.
If you mean "Save money", then that's wrong too. ChromeOS is by default more lightweight than traditional Desktop OS's because of the relative lack of legacy cruft and the managed runtime. Even the Linux distro it includes is very stripped down by default (although you can bog it down by running too much stuff like any computer)
The only thing you can't do is run Windows or Mac specific software, but if you need that, ChromeOS was never a consideration anyways.
> Of course, I wouldn't do these on a school-specced Chromebook that costs $200, but $700 Chromebook would easily suffice.
I have used linux VMs on a an old $200 Chromebook (with a $50 Costco discount) and it's perfectly fine, Linux can go a long way with only 4GB RAM/32GB eMMC. It doesn't receive updates anymore, so I use the latest Firefox from Devian repos to browse the Internet instead of the stale Chrome that has many open CVEs
I think they mean save money on hardware based on the previous part of the sentence
My wife and my 9yo have Chromebooks. Their needs are met. I (mostly) don't have to worry about data hygiene.
I'm sure my kid will want a "real" computer at some point, but by then he will hopefully have enough maturity to keep it secure. My wife couldn't care less.
> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything,
In a time when buttons are too expensive, avoiding having a windows key is a valuable savings :P
I've purchased a few chromebooks over time, and probably need to get one more for my mother-in-law. For her, the limitations of ChromeOS are a feature --- it's much harder for her to screw it up when she's on a call with fake support than with windows and she hadn't run anything other than a browser on her windows computer anyway.
Certainly the core hardware is basically the same, but fluffy optional hardware tends to be left off or lower cost for Chromebooks. Many manufacturers offer laptops without an OS, but you usually miss out on pricing promotions so you're paying for Windows even if you don't want it. Chromebooks get pricing promotions and firesales, so careful shopping gets you pretty inexpensive computers that are good enough to do what they need to do.
I don't like the forced expiration, and it's especially brutal when you purchase a new device late in its model life ... but I do try to purchase models that can use 3rd party bios replacement scripts so you can use them for other stuff when the OS is too far expired. Kind of derpy to have to bios replace to run ChromeOS flex to keep doing what you were doing, but such is life. Sometimes the device doesn't live that long, and that's fine too. Some of the chrombooks are cheaper simply because they have a very tiny SSD, and few of them are user replaceable, which makes prospects for running Windows later in life pretty bleak, but Windows is pretty bleak these days anyway. :P
I get your point, but in my experience, predatory ads are the most dangerous things elderly need to watch out for.
It's absolutely appalling just how many ads show up on the most boring and mainstream sites, and just how many of them are just straight up fraud or scams. I think ad blocking is a fundamental internet safety issue, if you want to hand a laptop to an older relative, and ChromeOS doesn't do anything against scam subscriptions.
Schools and boomers
For schools it can be locked down with group policies, for boomers it's just a machine to use a web browser
Yeah pretty much this. Google had a pretty successful effort to sell these devices as part of a managed solution: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/technology/google-educati...
Im guessing it was pretty easy for teachers (who they reached out to bypassing school procurement officers) or IT to manage.
Honestly, I used use a cheap chromebook throughout college since it was a fantastic linux device. Cheap (bought secondhand), Very little compute power, but fantastic keyboard, battery life, durable, light, and it ran coreboot. Super easy to unlock too for the early devices. You just had to remove the read protect screw. Obviously thats very niche though