@@DisketteKitchen I need to be able to edit things and sync between computers Having to retype everything to be in a digital format would be a ton of extra work for no reason
One of the goals of an efficient and effective IT department is standardization. It's the reason businesses don't buy from a different manufacturer each year or upgrade period. Chromebooks' badness is part of what makes them cheap and easy to admin. Compared to letting everyone bring a mix or to buying a different corporate sell-off each year, chromebooks end up making sense for a school that has to consider the lifetime cost. They're bad, but they're consistently and equally bad. This saves the school the burden of supporting personal laptops, and it shields them from discrimination complaints where students who are given managed hardware feel it is worse in some way. It's also a TI situation, where a private corporation has weaseled in as a "necessity" in public schools and now we can't extract them without breaking things.
As I wrote in my comment (for reference) I was an intern at a high-school, mostly managing chromebooks. They used like 3-4 different manufacturers and different models from them, so I'd argue the argument of "fairness" doesn't work. I'll agree with the management point, since the school's IT infrastructure was basically wholly moved to google "cloud" services so there was very little they had to do on the management side of things. Then again, if people could use their own laptops, they could access their google accounts anyway.
I... half agree, as a school IT admin. They are... kind of easy to manage, when they work. The problems with them come when they stop working, both when the children break them and when the support ends. Software management is easier; the school can install their own extensions and applications, while also tightly controlling what extensions and applications are allowed to be loaded aside from that, so Chrimebooks being the only allowed devices lets us limit untimely extracurricular activities during class, they can do that on their personal devices at home. Replacement parts can cost more than buying a new machine, about $3500 was spent recently on a pile of top shells, keyboards, and motherboards for our HP G8/G9 fleet, enough to cover about thirty machines, fifteen of each model, where buying a whole thirty new machines would cost about $4K; if we had to buy displays for them, thankfully we don't, that would easily blow well past $4K. These are eWaste devices, all the way through. When they end support, the Chromebooks technically keep working, but the longer you keep using it, the more likely things begin to break in the software, and the more of a security risk it becomes for the whole network. We have a gigantic pile of Dell Chromebook 3180s that are stuck on ChromeOS 103, and they don't work properly with the testing suite anymore, there are massive security holes that have been discovered and patched since then, and most of the parts for these machines don't fit any of the newer machines, except for the displays; the displays out of them fit our Dell 3100s, 3110s, and even the HP G8s and G9s, so we've requisitioned several hundred displays out of the eWaste 3180s, and that has helped keep the repair costs down for the newer machines, one of the few reasons the cost of repair hasn't exceeded the cost to replace.
Chromebooks are just so damn boring! Even a cheap Windows laptop usually has better specs. I see a Chromebook and immediately want to install Linux on it.
Chromebook user here. Linux is installable in settings and I use it to run Firefox and that's also how you can play steam games and such. They can do a lot if you know how to use them
Actually in the terms of school we should not be getting kids started on chromebooks when in the real world you WILL be using windows at work hand down no debate, you setting kids up for failure when they can’t operate a computer
I’m a windows user, dabbled in Linux and MacOS, probably a few months away from dual booting Debian on my main system. What about most occupations guarantee that people “WILL be using windows at work hands down no debate”? Unless they’re getting in programming or software development, I can’t see how anything a computer oriented job requires you to do can’t be done in a browser. The Chromebooks in the cheap end might be utter shit in accordance to pricing, but the value they save underfunded schools in bulk orders does make a difference We’re talking about schools spending some 20-30% more on windows laptops that are equally shitty or worse, just for the potential to… “prepare” them, for an increasingly browser based world? Even billion dollar tech companies I’ve worked under have resources to teach you software basics and IT support on hand because unless you’re in a development position, they don’t expect you to be a computer wizard. Spreadsheets, presentations, emails and virtual conferences, and even specialised tools specific to your work are more than likely available on a browser.
@@singhaxes7810Schools should be buying used laptops off of offices. They could run linux, which is a more capable os than chrome, and the build quality will be better.
Interestingly kids have been using Chromebooks in schools for 5-10 years now depending on the district. So the first kids who know would have used Chromebooks for most of their school years will be entering the work force right about now. We might start seeing a shift where workplaces start deploying Chromebooks to meet workers where their skills are
I don't get how chromebooks can be so expensive and so bad at the same time. The hardware is very cheap and they don't even need to pay for a windows license. Also great video, the subscriber count go way up.
I love Chromebooks. My mom's Windows PC needs constant troubleshooting while her Chromebook just works. Best investment I've ever made. If a Chromebook ran Ableton I'd switch to a quality one. Every time i have to interact with Microsoft's abomonation of a system my soul dies a little bit. Performance isn't everything
I see a bunch of people having tons of issues with Windows, but in my like 8 years of using it I've never had it brick itself (I have bricked it a few times, but it was completely my fault or sometimes intentional) and I've only seen like 10 bluescreens (all caused by modified GPU drivers)
Chromebooks are great for older folk, same as Apple computers but a way more reasonable price. It's locked down and secure, good luck messing it up, lol.
Chromebooks are good for older people who only use Netflix and UA-cam. But for adults, who use multiple apps like coding or office, it's pretty bad. I guess a MacBook can be a blanket check as it's simple without those restrictions of a chromebook
At that point just use linux. I also just saw a video about chromeos-based distro that doesn't actually suck and comes with android and linux software support out of the box. Doesn't tie you down to just chrome, doesn't require a google account and etc. So it's just better. (In this case FydeOS, the "freeish" desktop version just requires you to pay on biiig OVA updates and you can update it by hand anyway without paying if you care) When you describe a software-related issue on a full product critique, you have gotta realize that you're ignoring the rest of the problem. Expandable storage? No. Expandable RAM? No. Adequate reparability? No. Adequate support? No. It can just break at some point due to a software issue and the same issue will stop you from installing a different OS. How fucked is that? On normal hardware you can have even the same OS if you're a google megafan or smth and enjoy the same benefits, while not having the idiotic downsides of the chomebooks' design.
@@mike_dizA cheap, used ThinkPad with Linux will certainly blow any Chromebook out of the water. But Chromebooks are simple and somewhat similar to Android, which many people are used to. Linux on the other hand has quite a learning curve. I‘d always recommend it, but only to someone who‘s actually willing to learn a bit about the OS.
Chromebook user here. Whilst I agree the MAJORITY of Chromebooks suck, they're actually pretty decent if you just buy one with a better processor. I got one with a pentium gold (rather than the atoms or athlons they usually ship with) and I have been able to get through uni with it and it runs much faster than the one you mentioned in the video. Granted it's not perfect and a used windows laptop may be better value, but they aren't all that bad. And Google has launched Chromebook +, with better processors (like i3, i5, i7 ect) and more features.
That’s a fair point, part of what I maybe didn’t get across is just that it’s not just the hardware, but also ChromeOS by itself that’s part of the problem
@DisketteKitchen While ChromeOS is indeed very limited compared to windows, have you ever seen someone who older and isn't tech savy try to use modern windows? Genuinely, the experience is truely aweful for anyone who doesnt use computers on a regular basis. My dad, who is in his mid 50s, was unable to get past the captcha on a new Windows 11 laptop he purchased because it forced him into making a new microsoft account... So he returned it and bought a chromebook. all he wanted to do was create a new resume, so he bought a chromebook and moved on with his life since the long term performance or specs were not really important to him. Sometimes specs are not a consideration at all for the end user, its whether or not the device works at all for them. I hope this perspective is useful, keep up the good work!
I agree for use cases you talk about, but my parents have trouble with the different layers of abstraction that come with a regular pc. The fact that a browser has different rules than the regular window manager, for example. Switching them to chromebooks has cut down on parental tech support massively.
can't screw it up if it's just a web browser and android tablet glued together. I don't disagree that they're useful, but at the same time I wish there was a version that allowed you to use a better browser, like firefox or librewolf, etc.
I get why these have become the norm, and I may have narrowly missed their distribution in my personal public school experience being 30. BUT DAMN. The unanticipated consequence of this generation of Chromebook users entering the work place, in my experience, has been a new wave of hires that are as equally scared and unfamiliar with Windows UI and Office Suite apps as the 50+ crowd. Of course I'm generalizing, but this is definitely a broad trend. American public education is famously awful, but if it did anything right it prepared people to competently sit in front of a screen for 9 hours a day.
Definitely not a norm in the circles I have been, currently in university and nowhere during my Ms/hs years have I seen someone have one as a personal device and the only time I encountered them was an external Instances loan choice.
hey, heads up for the graphs: in resolution, 4k is measuring the number of pixels in width, while 1080p, 720p, etc. measure the number of pixels in height. for measurement accuracy, 4k should be represented by 2160p instead
few things i really hate chromebooks and chrome os in general: 1. installing other OS is proven to be more tricky than normal PC. imagine you need to disassemble to just remove write protection & not only that, you need to find custom BIOS to install other OS. if you successfully booted to windows/standard linux, lot of things not compatible. 2. virtualizing chrome os. yeah there is Fyde & works in VMWare BUT i want to try vanilla chrome os flex. they always don't work. i've tried vmware, virtualbox & even QEMU, none of them working! 3. keyboard. i'm not talking about the typing quality but the layout. why no super key? why the caps lock key replaced by search?
I use a $130 Chromebook as a typing machine and it's wonderful. They're also perfect youtube and web consumption machines for my parents and my grandfather. Most people don't need a powerhouse, in fact, especially older people with no tech background, and making them run windows or linux should be considered elder abuse
this was a real learning experience for me. got me with the title, hooked me with the data. hope your channel will continue to grow; one of the best videos i've seen all year
I bought a cheap acer c720 chromebook back in 2014. I believe google was subsidizing the hardware in an attempt to gain adaption, so it was under $100 new. I immediately wiped it and installed various linux distros on that thing for years. At that time, it was the perfect school machine. It had enough power to get school work done, but not really enough power to do anything too distracting.
The use of chromebooks in schools is a prime example of equality vs equity - equality is giving everyone the same baseline - aka a shitty chromebook - while equity targets those most affected by inequality and dedicates resources specifically to them - i.e. giving better computers to students without them.
It is, just get her one with 8GB of ram minimum because the Play Store (which you can disable, but then you lose acess to android apps) eats it up. Either go with an ARM cpu for battery life and good app usage (bonus, these usually do not need fans so no maintenance needed whatsoever), or an Intel cpu for power and Linux but less battery and mandatory fans (plus, it's heavier).
12:32 I agree with you on this point so much. The school is spending more and providing a worse experience by not focusing on those who really need the laptop instead of giving them out to everyone
I spent five years as the senior technician at one of the biggest Chromebook suppliers in the country. They. Are. Terrible. How they are still relevant is insane, and disgusting.
As someone who had to use them in the office, it was an absolute nightmare, constant freezes, memory leak issues, etc. Probably cut our productivity in half.
There is one very specific reason I am considering buying a Chromebook. From my understanding Chromebooks are capable of using android apps. Likewise they are able purchase things off of the google play store. I use a google pixel 8 for my phone and I use calyx os instead of stock android for privacy and security reasons. Due to this it runs the Aurora store which is a front end for google play that allows me to anonymously download which app I want as long as it's free. I can also download paid apps if I temporarily sign in to a google account that has already purchased said app. My major issue I cannot actually purchase an app on Aurora. I would either need to revert to stock android or have a second device with it. The former is out of the question and a Chromebook as a toy seems more appealing to me than an old android phone.
Knock yourself out, you'll love the Chromebook. They're more usedul than Android tablets and the weasel in the video didn't use a good one on purpose. He also didn't showcase the full capabilities of the Chromebook either. For instance, he didn't show that a fast and newer one could replace an Android tablet since you can use their apps. He didn't show linux capabilities and using snap. Hes a Microsoft shill.
You CAN have an android subsystem on any(ish) linux distro. (Also an emulator or vm y'know) I'd say give that a try before anything else. I'm planning on playing around with it myself. Sent from LineageOS 💪 Also you can use FydeOS, ChromeOS (or is it ChromiumOS) based distro, also comes with android subsystem as well as the ability to run linux software. So definitely better than just stock ChromeOS. And can be installed on any (?) hardware, not just chromebooks
@@MrJhwan well it IS linux based so it kinda has to be open-source by license. But google is pretty nice regarding open-sourcing stuff, ironically. I mean android is open-source as well (also kinda has to be by license imma guess since yet again it's based on linux) so it kinda makes sense that if one is os (I'm tired of writing open-source and yet I wrote it again here) then so would be the other.
Dude picks garbage Chrome ooks then complains that they're garbage. Meanwhile, windows is so bloated that people struggle to create smaller and lighter versions of the garbage OS just so their conputers don't lag but then run into major problems later on because its so gutted.
I can see why that Samsung is struggling to play on the Chromebook. It has an old integrated graphics chip that can only play older video codecs while UA-cam has recently been pushing the newer AV1 codec. Without a proper hardware decoder, video playback tends to fallback on software decoding, and this is much more computationally intensive. A relatively simple workaround is installing a plugin like h264-ify to forcibly disable AV1 video playback and make YT fall back on using VP9 or H264
yes chromebooks don't make sense. they should cost alot less than they do. they are probably marketed towards administrators seeing how the only "good" feature they have is the remote management. all that being said i currently have six of them. the features that make me use them are open documented bios and embeded controllers, which i think is neat, not necessarily useful for most people. all the ones i'm using are using ultra low power cpus from 2016 so they're not very fast but can still handle anything except adds. does anyone know if they is a browser extension that limits cpu useage of adds?
@@existenceispain_geekthesiren nothing wrong with chrome os if your not requiring anything other then a web browser if you ask for more then your getting outside the box of what it's designed to do
@@existenceispain_geekthesiren sure but it’s not “competing” with anyone that would be dumb. It was not designed to more than a web browser. Fundamentally 2 separate sides of a coin and a welcomed change. If you still want windows or whatever that’s fine but the mass majority of people really don’t do anything with there computers other then a web browser. To the point that most people don’t even buy new computers and have moved to tablets and the lot.
First, even with Chromebooks, specs still matter. And schools tend to buy dog shit when it comes to computers. and even Chrome OS will chug along. I get that it's probably the only Chromebook you had access to...still an unfair comparison when comparing a school Chromebook with Thinkpads, even if they're a few years old. Secondly, people can see PCs and Macs as their own separate thing, but when it comes to Chromebooks, they're constantly compared to the two. That's also unfair as Chrome OS does offer plenty of value still. Yes, it was once a useless browser based system. But with Android apps integration, the right machine can definitely stand on its own merits. When you consider how much we use our phones, being on a system with a similar ecosystem can be important to some people. Being a constant Samsung Dex user, I certainly understand the value.
Chromebooks are actually a great little puzzle gift to give to a very technical person. The challenge is to install proper Linux on it and then rice it to be just as intuitive as the admittedly pretty damn good Chromebook UI. And that's primarily how I think about them. Devices to practice things that could well brick a device without fear of spending a ton.
Something else to add My school has these Lenovo things that have the specs of a Chromebook yet they have windows on them and it takes 10 minutes to sign in and another 10 to sign out
When i was in school, we got little ubuntu machines. They usually never had any performance problems and we would learn about open source software early on
This is a bad comparison. You take a $200 laptop that you likely didn't choose the model of to get a form factor and keyboard you like and then compare it to latops in the ~$1000+ price range. Additionally, Linux is not about being lightweight, fast, or having a customizeable interface. The Linux kernel is heavyweight as it is a kernel designed for general purpose use cases. All of this extra complexity makes it much heavier than the lighterweight kernels you may find for embedded devices. While performance is important it is in fact limited by the hardware. A kernel can't magically make your hardware go faster. Linux itself doesn't have a user interface other than the capability of showing a terminal. It requires other compoents to provide a user interface. This video also fails to mention the security of Chromebooks as they are one of the most secure laptops you can buy. Both from a hardware and sodtware perspective.
Before I got a job and got my own ROG Strix laptop, I was chugging a 15 year old Lenovo Thinkpad. I absolutely adored it. I could run Minecraft Bedrock and Java at the same time on the laptop screen AND an external monitor. I even tried stress testing it in my young mind's way by setting up some redstone to blow up about 1K tnt each screen (heck, I even had shaders on the Java instance of Minecraft). It fell off of the counter multiple times (it even had a disk drive and not an SSD and no option for one), it had been blessed by multiple slurpings of Ramen Noodles, it had a cup of water splash on the keyboard, the J key broke off so I put the ` key in its place, and a single fan in the computer slapped on the CPU that could blow at stupid speeds. It was incredible how it had survived so long. Even then, it still can crank a few 90's in bedwars even too lol
When I started 6th grade in 2015 I got a brand new MacBook Air, so did every other 6-12th grade student. That would probably be about 800 MBAs lended out to students for use during the school year. Now my rural small town school district has some “funding allocation issues” that cause the Superintendent to accidentally get a 6 figure salary and pay the teachers less than a Walmart worker but in the end we all got a mid-spec MacBook Air for the next 4 years. In 2019 for my 10th grade year they were replaced with 6th gen iPads, no keyboards, no nothing. We were almost begging for Chromebooks because writing 4 page psychology papers on an iPad virtual keyboard is hell. Most of us who cared/could afford to bought laptops for our 11th and 12th grade year because some kids had basically had their personal computer taken from them. I know some people who TO THIS DAY haven’t owned a personal computer since. I think now they at least give the kids keyboards with the new iPads they got the school year after I graduated but a tablet cannot replace the experience of a laptop.
Everytime I learn a caller at my center has a Chromebook, it goes downhill. It's even worse, because most are not tech literate enough to understand what that means. They just say "It's an HP." Yes, you have purchased a HP with a half working operating system.
You should have run these tests on an unmanaged ChromeOS install, the enterprise restrictions significantly affects the performance. Of course the loading speed is much longer, they're running your traffic through a proxy with a heavy amount of checking and a lot of usage. The laptops are bought in bulk, so the school is getting it for much cheaper than the selling price.
This was best case, given it was on my home WiFi and the school only blocks sites through their network, plus part of my point is that they shouldn’t be used in schools
@@DisketteKitchenAgain, most people dont use Chromebooks in a home or office environment, i dont know why schools use them unless they signed a contract for a long time
@@IMX383 They use it for the very management software that is unfourtunately also bogging down a lot of the performance. Having the entire OS be essentially one tiny container of a web browser is like a breath of fresh air compared to the shitshow of trying to lock down Windows.
I sometimes think that the way technology is taught in school is detrimental to kids' acquisition of IT skills. iPads in school, while great for digital art classes and handwriting in math classes (if you can trust kids not to lose an Apple pencil... Darwin knows how often I lose and find mine), aren't really as capable (especially the lower end models), and unless the school shells out a lot for keyboard cases to convert them into iOS laptops, they'll miss out on typing practice. At least you get that on a Chromebook, but a Chromebook has a very crappy way of handling what little local storage it offers you, and every program you use is either an HTML "Web app" or the same Web app offline. Kids don't really learn about how to manage a file system, how to use programs that are stored in local storage, or even how to use Windows or MacOS, which have more in common with each other these days than they do with ChromeOS. Schools will drop everything to teach what they think is the "latest and greatest" like a crappy netbook that you can't use without a Google account, and that forces you to put whatever you can in the cloud. Kids wind up thinking that you can't even use a computer without going online. There's less coverage of the software that they'll likely be able to make a job out of - no coverage of Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint (not the limited online versions), no MATLAB or any kind of advanced calculation programs that can run outside the cloud, no professional CAD that runs in the box, no full versions of Photoshop or even Ableton or Pro Tools. No opportunities to learn SQL or Python right on your system. No KiCAD. Not even Audacity. The way I see it, the standardization of Chromebooks and iPads in school IT essentially prioritizes trends in consumer electronics among those who'd never use a laptop for fun over teaching kids useful IT skills. Keyboarding has been cut and now kids can't even type very efficiently. There's this idea that contemporary tech is easy, that it's designed to be easy, and that kids don't really need to learn it on a deeper level or learn to type since they already know. But most kids don't even use computers anymore unless their families are well-off and they're into PC gaming, music production, animation, video editing, CAD, etc., etc. They use smartphones with tiny keyboards, tablets/iPads, etc. and never really learn to type. And then, these Gen Z'ers who don't even really seem to care about computers in the slightest, whose only experience using them is on some neutered version of Linux and/or stripped down touchscreen macOS, are the ones who hunt and peck their college essays, struggle with computers in the office, never bother to learn MS Excel, etc. Would you let someone drive a bus without a license since they drove around eScooters and electric quads as a kid, or because they got to drive a tractor around the family farm occasionally? Would that mean they're already a great driver? Would such a person be trusted with the additional controls of an excavator at a construction site? Should we just say "hey, driving is easy, let's not bother to prepare kids for the road, they already know it and they depend on it!"? NO!
I've never used a chromebook so maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but why isn't it possible to use MATLAB, python, CAD software, etc. on a chromebook? All of these are doable on linux machines
I don't think that you mean Gen Z but that you actually mean Gen Alpha seeing that I, like many of my peers, grew up with actual Desktop computers and Laptops, IOS and Windows machines (mostly the latter where I come from) and still had typing classes in Middle School. And I am 24, a Uni student and in the oldest bracket of Gen Z.
@@tracervullet8667chromeos when managed by an organization (as schools do) cannot install any programs from a file and, importantly, cannot run any programs that are not in the google play store. Many schools go further and even disable the playstore, locking the users of the chromebooks into just the browser and web-based apps.
I go to an iPad high school and the level of competency with computers is astoundingly bad. It was honestly kind of shocking realising just how poor IT skills are in kids coming from a family of computer nerds.
I've never liked the used Chromebook I had, and what's worse is that it was so old it never got the android app support before reaching EOL. I ended up modding it with the MrChromeBox EFI firmware a couple months ago and I'm kinda thankful it uses the same charger as my good laptop.
I think a lot of the concern with BYOD in schools is the lack of control. Sure you can block certain websites on the school internet but what's to stop the kid from going home installing a VPN and then becoming unrestricted at school. Then there's the issue of students demanding help from school IT to fix their personal laptops which is a total nightmare and then having to deal with the Karen mom when we tell her we don't do that. Source I'm in IT at a university
I wouldnt be surprised if school's got a very nice discount by buying Chromebooks in bulk or by just by letting them be the sole provider of school laptops. Honestly I think the real problem stems from it just not really teaching how to use a computer. Kids would struggle with with basic Windows systems, much more if they were forced to use Linux for work. I like to think of them as the underpowered, cheapo version of a Mac, but atleast Apple has a thriving, if expensive, ecosystem to integrate with. Google has...uh...
Almost fifteen seconds to load a website on a device defined by one of the most giant Internet giants is almost as funny as said device being made under the same parent company as UA-cam but struggling to play those videos. Nice vid! Also, that frog fabric reminds me of a cat fabric I got as a kid and have never figured out a worthy enough use for haha
an old $40 used chromebook is a great thing to have -- i think i have one in just about every room of my house. i also use them when i am taking a bath since -- if they fall in the water -- no big deal. they're not updated and sometimes a website refuses to load on it, but it's a nice disposable laptop
Dude is just a biased, dirty, nerdy liar with 0 fashion sense. I didn't think dudes like him were real. I mean, what is that ugly shirt? I wanted to hear some valid criticisms but instead I heard this list of garbage.
I am one of the fortunate few that had a PowerBook or MacBook program in Middle school. It taught me Mac OS and its weird quirks. Every student got a powerbook unless they elected to purchase a MacBook which was subsidized to have a lower cost. It was locked down but parents/students got the admin rights after graduation and proceeded to use them until college. But what ultimately killed the take home program (they still kept units on site for a per class need basis) is REPAIR costs. People constantly broke these units (though they were repairable - Apple was different then) it was still costly - and that's the part about Chromebooks. They are so cheap- that replacing the unit is far cheaper than parts and labor. I agree though - Chromebooks in general (barring highest end Chromebooks) kinda suck- mainly for the ewaste and life span reasons mentioned along with price to performance ratio. Pixelbooks seem to be really well made though.
It was great- we also figured out how to Jailbreak em partially- install proxies and play flash games 😂. I think modern solution in the district is iPad deployment with a rugged keyboard case.
Question: Are there any Linux distros you can recommend for a Chromebook? Is there ANY possibility to use the capability of the touchscreen in Linux? My father gifted me the "Acer Chromebook Spin (CP311-3H)" because he has no use for it and I figured I could use it as a light laptop for university. I never really used Linux before and want to go into it now. I just need it to run a browser, a editor like word to run, and a pdf reader and maybe something to draw! Any other need is covered by my more powerfull devices. Thanks in advance :)
Thanks to both! But I realized I only have 4GB of total storage available, which seems to not work on most distros, except for the very lightweight ones that also seem to lack integrated touchscreen support. I think I gonna use it for now with chrome OS to see how I use it and if I really need the touchscreen support. If not I might consider Puppy Linux or some other Lightweight solution or maybe I even take the time to calibrate the touchscreen support myself if I find the time. Anyway, I will try out Linux regardles through virtual Box and see what fancys me!
I was doing an internship at some high-school along with a few other people and more than half the time we were fixing broken chromebooks. The worst offender was when they just refused to boot, saying that there is no wifi, even though it was connected. I tried unlocking a few but they can't even be unlocked without internet. Considering they have no ethernet port. I tried using a hotspot: nothing. I should've tried usb tethering, alas I didn't think of it at the time. It's like after a certain date they just become unusable. We couldn't even strip them for parts because all of this class (there were different manufacturers and models) had the same issue. So they are actually just trash. Meanwhile there were also a few thinkpads with pretty decent hardware so we put SSDs in them, installed whatever the labs needed and rolled them out. In conclusion, fuck chromebooks
Years ago I considered a Chromebook because of the price. Then I remembered I don't want more, but less dependency on Google and didn't buy one. I also needed better specs not that much later so I'm glad I just got a laptop with better specs immediately. Turned out the university also banned Chromebooks from even connecting with their network. They got locked into a contract with Google for their e-mail support and have since gotten rid of it. Using Google laptops in schools makes not a lot of sense considering Google doesn't give an F about any kind of privacy. I'm slowly phasing out of Google as much as I can, which isn't as much as I want to.
I have nothing wrong with chromebooks theoretically, but oh my god the fact that kids aren't trusted with windows machines in schools makes some of the youngins completely computer illiterate.
My family had a chromebook briefly when my brothers and I were in high school. All I did was watch videos, use Discord, and do online quizzes/tests. I literally hated that thing so much. I _dreaded_ anytime I had to use it. So slow for no reason.
i did the octane bench mark on my computer while watching youtube and i got 3432 it could be becuase my computer has a pentium or becuase im using windows 8.1. i still prefer this then chromeos
It’s good for my mother who _only_ wants a laptop for what Chromebooks were originally designed to be; a simple & reliable web browser with a screen, speakers, keyboard, & trackpad wrapped around it.
I really wish Chromebooks were better, I've been wanting a typewriter experience for writing and chrome books seem ideal for this but I just can't justify a few hundred bucks for something that would be so miserable to use.
I bought a Chromebook for $50 few years back, put Windows 10 on it, replaced the Wifi/bluetooth module with an NVME SSD, and it's been the best damn laptop. Cheap, light...cheap. I play GTR2 on it. I watch movies. I do game dev stuff. It's actually fine.
I have no idea what a Chromebook would accomplish that my $70 mid 2011 MacBook Air couldn’t do. It is pretty slow on MacOS but with Linux it is pretty responsive, and it will stream video, do video calls, steam in home streaming, office software. Isn’t that the stuff a Chromebook is supposed to be doing?
Bro those prices for Thinkpads are dope, in my country are really hard to fin new or used for that proce. Nice vid :D Would loved if you mentioned first the flexibility of the windows system for the non computer geeks
So I definitely get the case against schools buying Chromebooks (and am inclined to agree) but I think your Chromebook experience is far from universal. I have an Asus CM34 Flip that I got for ~$250, specifically because I didn't want to take an expensive, bulky, or particularly fragile laptop to classes. The screen is nice; it has a long battery life and charges quickly; and it does any sort of web browsing I need it to do. The Linux support with Crostini is also decent, though not ideal. Of course, I also have a desktop and wouldn't want it to be my **only** computer, but I don't feel like I would be much better off with a ~$250 Windows laptop. And good luck getting any Mac for that price.
While I agree generally with your main argument, I have some small nitpicks or things that might warrant considering from the perspective of someone who has seen both sides of low end device deployment. Usability vs Scalability: 100% giving every student a Chromebook is a disservice if the intended goal is learning how to properly and efficiently use the machine. However, most of the time the intended goal is to just be sure everyone has a device that can roughly follow the curriculum. In a lot of high schools, any use case more intensive than browser use (such as your mentioned graphic design course) will likely have a lab that can have a high power machine which is usable by 5-10 students per device. Doing this is also an easy way to avoid logistics hell, which is an unfourtunate side effect to your proposed solution of just buying laptops for students that need them. For schools that have a couple thousand or more students, doing so is just not worth the man hours. And this is before needing to work around students who may initially be able to supply their own laptop, but for some circumstancial reason might need one later on. This would create the need for having spares on hand, which defeats the purpose of being able to buy less machines. Cost, Repairability, and Cherry-Picking: One other major point of your was cost, but I think you either missed or left off a couple points. First, you point out that the Lenovo machines are cheaper when secondhand, but what looks like the list price for the Chromebook doesn't take into account bulk pricing that the school most likely gets, which increases at higher volumes. Additionally, since they are cheaper devices that are still relatively modular, if one breaks like yours did it would be far less painful on the budget to just rip the guts out of a different one and swap it back in. And that's not even taking account the state that I saw a painful amount of the working Chomebooks my peers had, where the device still working through all the crumbs and food dust is frankly a miracle. This is more of a minor nitpick, but the whole "It's ChromeOS so it uses Chrome even if other browsers are an option" thing seemed like a bit of a bad-faith after just saying Edge was not going to be forced on Windows simply because it was pre-installed with the OS. The "Standard User": One thing that might have been good to ask alongside whether people own a laptop is what they use it for. Having worked in a couple different support-esque positions, I've seen that most people legitimately do have the Chromebook use case of "if it runs the web browser I'm fine". As much as it may be insane to you and I that people don't understand stuff in the digital age, most people aren't interested in turbo-optimizing their typing speed, their time between pages, or losing a second or two on the cheap computer they use to do the homework assignment on for an hour in a day. Again, I think what Chromebooks have become is a painful waste of potential. ChromeOS Flex is amazing at breathing new life into machines that get massacred by Windows, and ChromeOS is so much more approachable than any standard form of Linux for anyone who barely even understands how a filesystem works and doesn't want to spend hours learning and troubleshooting new issues. eMMc is a joke of a technology that should never be used in a computing device, even super low low cost devices could get away with using some sort of decent flash memory to bring up the entire experience like SSDs did when everyone still used HDDs. Discounting Chromebooks for "Everyone" though (yes I know clickbait title, but the point is still there) discounts a lot of legitimately good ways that super cheap laptops can still provide value to the average person.
To help improve the hardware of Chromebooks, Google has set standards for Chromebook Plus models. They're built to be easy laptops for people who aren't very tech savy. For most high schools a basic Chromebook is more than enough.
At my school we're forced to use chrombooks too. Accept I got ahold of an employees network login so I just use my personal laptop, lol. As a robotics club captain I kinda need a laptop anyways to do basic shit
I literally just tested a PC i made out of JUNK with an Athlon 2 and a GTS 250 on Windows 7 for a Video. That‘s a system that would roughly be over 10 years old. And it can play 1080p fullscreen EASY. 😂 Chromebooks are literal, manufactured, eWaste. Great video mate. ❤ Gonna check out more of your stuff.
I had a desktop with the exact same specs for years. It didn’t do too well on geekbench, but everyday stuff was much snappier than it should have been. The Athlon was a good CPU for its time.
Your are comparing Apples and Oranges here. A Chromebook is NOT MEANT as a primary machine for people like you who have 3D printers and a studio setup worth thousands and thousands of Dollars / Euros / Rubles. First things first: of course you probably are going to have a shitty experience with the cheapest Chromebooks. Just like you are going to have a shitty experience - even shittier I'd say - with the Windows Laptops in that price range. The cheapest MacBook Air right now is 1.100 USD. The cheapest Chromebooks are about 200. That difference has to come from somewhere. Comparing an i5 chip to a celeron (or below) and finding it faster is like being surprised a 10 year old mid class BMW with a 200 HP engine is nicer, roomier and quicker than a brand new Mitsubishi Mirage with a 1.2 liter three cylinder engine. There is NO point. Different devices built for different purposes and price ranges. If you are Tech-savvy, of course you will be able to do much more with a used couple-of-year-old ThinkPad + Linux for the same amount of money. No discussion. But Chromebooks are not meant for you. But there are very nice mid-tier Chromebooks out there that do offer i3 / i5 chipsets, sufficient RAM and storage that will give you a great user experience. In the private market, they are meant for people who have neither the knowledge nor inclination to learn about computers. They are meant for your Grandma / -pa. For your aunt who doesn't know the first thing about computers. For people who really only need access to their Google Mail etc. They don't know or care about security or privacy and as long as screens open reasonably fast, they don't care about performance either. They are also for organizations who want computers they can easily secure and administrate with users who are not really tech savvy and who just want to work. Work for those people means reading and responding to mails, chat, create documents and use other web applications. They love the good screens on the mid-class Chromebooks. They love that the battery lasts all day. They love they are not bugged with updates. They love that they can JUST WORK on those devices. No ChromeOS machine has yet fallen victim to malware. Not a single one. Because it doesn't work (90+% of malware is written for Windows) AND because the security on those machines is the best out-of-box-security you will find on the market right now. And as an Admin of an SMB I can tell you, people treat their devices like shit. Throw them down stairs, pour coffee in them, put pens on the keyboard and then close the lid... just to name a few things. What do you think I prefer as an Admin? A Windows laptop that costs me 800-900 Euros each time to replace those machines and then spend half a day to set them up and enroll them in Intune and update them? Or do you think I rather prefer to give my users machines of half that price that are set up, enrolled, updated and ready to use in under ten minutes? Are they for Engineers who have to do 3D modeling / CAD? Hell no! Are they for people who do a lot of Audio / Video / Photo editing? Hell no! Are they for hard core gamers? Hell no! But just because you don't see the value, doesn't mean there is none. Choose the right tool for the job.
Well not one time, but there're only so many spare parts (aka monitors and keyboards, the rest is soldered on) to fix the broken ones so the e-waste sure piles up 😃 truly an amazing product
When I was in high school the first chrome book I was given stopped working in class and the teacher sent me to the library to get a new one and I made sure to pick the nicest looking one that they had and fortunately it lasted. Now that I’m in college as a remote student the classes I need are in a campus that’s too far away from where I live. I was asked if I wanted a computer or use my own I chose to use my own computer that I built in January it beats anything that they could have given me.
Oh man. Whenever I see one of those small laptops with one of those Pentium or Athlon's, I know that the experience is going to suck. Only time it ever make sense to pull the trigger on such a unit is if a deal on one comes with a Ryzen 3/Intel i3 or Ryzen 5/Intel i5. It won't be the craziest of things, but good lord the difference is night and day.
This video was randomly recommended to me... But on that topic, a few months ago an elederly neighbor needed a need laptop and asked me for some recommendations and first thing I said just not a Chromebook and he's answer was your first one 🤣 He is far from a computer person, but he even knew how bad they were. The other neighbor though not so lucky, her mother ordered a new laptop and they said it was so slow on setup and they couldn't figure it out, I assumed it was windows, until she started describing what she seen on the screen.. And I'm like you need to return that... Mainly because her mother uses software that is windows based. This happens way too often with the elderly not knowing its a chrome book and just thinking its a windows laptop that they are used to. Yes Chromebooks have a place, but 90% of the time its not it, like in your video just get some older used laptop and you'll come out loads better.
I received a laptop for birthday gift in 2017, the same one i'm using today, the Lenovo B490 with a intel core i3-3110M and 4GB of RAM as well as a 500 GB Seagate hard drive, 13 and half inches screen or so. It costed approximately 90$ adjusted for inflation today and has been overall better than the average national brand OEM several years after and offered me upgradability in the form of an SSD and 8GB of RAM. Also did i mention it runs Windows 10? Not a great outlook for Chromebooks at all on the other hand.
Great comparison, finally someone who doesn't limit the good laptop because the bad laptop doesn't have the same features (which shows the opposite of real world performance)
I remember a ways back Samsung made a super swanky $1100 chromebook. The finest news reading and urgent email answering machine that does nothing else. The executive breakfast and airplane laptop (their daily driver is a bigger laptop that never leaves their desk)
Holy shit, this channel just got recommended to me and it’s exactly the kind of stuff I’m into. Quite the rabbit hole of videos for me to go through now :D
If you wanted to do another test, it'd be interesting to see how Chromebooks compare to an android tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard. Since that would be in the same price category.
There should be a standard for performance and build quality under which a laptop can not be sold. Perhaps even certain feautures reauired for a given pricepoint. I am tired of manufacturers having streight up trash for all budget tiers and expensive laptops with gaping flaws
When I was in 10th or 11th grade I believe that was the year my school made the switch from Chromebooks to Windows laptops. Granted, the Windows laptops were ass too as they could only play Touhou Project at 30fps.
7:40 This is something about chromebooks. I really doubt the page load times are so different just because of CPU. I'm willing to bet that the wifi chips play a role here. Hardware makers see chromebooks as an opportunity to include the shittiest internals ever. So 90% sure this is because the chromebook's wifi chip is shit.
Chromebooks are great value if you get them second hand. Im on a very old Acer730e chromebook objectively terrible specs. It still runs fine, its light, small and has good battery life because the battery are easy to find and replace. Instead of running chrome OS I run fedora linux which allows me to use it like a computer. I brought this chromebook for cost of 1 uber eats meals. It can run 5000 fish at smooth fps. It runs a text editor and a web browser which is all i need it for.
I'm not really a big fan of Chromebooks myself, but I think this point is rather flawed. You're comparing all of this to a 3 - 5 year old laptop, but Chromebooks have changed quite a bit recently. With the launch of the Chromebook Plus Chromebooks, they're actually not that bad now. These laptops have decent specs for a decent price, definitely much better than the one singular Chromebook you compared these to. And as many things today (or at least in school) are web based, there's really not a need for anything more than just a Chromebook. So pretty much, my point is that Chromebooks really aren't that bad anymore
I've been, and still am a student when chromebooks were starting to exist in education. As a youngin, I didn't care about the speed. But now that I have fast PC and laptop (the latter i got from a school for 80$), I now see the changes in speed. It can't even keep up with my typing! I don't type that fast, and it lags when I type. If you have a google doc, slide presentation, and wikipedia, it's barely usable, and it lags. These pieces of garbage are replacing compitent computers that can't run windows 11 because of TPM 2.0.
I really liked my lenovo duet comvertible tablet thing, but despite a long support life, a recent update made it unusable. I do have a desktop mac so i got an ipac mini to pair with it instead. Its too bad, with appropriate expectations, my lenovo duet was ok for quite a while. Maybe i will charge it back up and see if there is a new update that has un-ruined it
If you are considering a Chromebook just get an iPad with a keyboard and you got a way better computer. My School for example got iPad 9th gen for all Students although without a keyboard (except for teachers they also get a keyboard case) but even at this state its better than a Chromebook and similarly cheap.
you owe me child support.
uwunix
I don't
linux
linux
@@checkoffgamesNot yet
I use a cheap Chromebook for writing specifically because it sucks at doing anything else which means I can be less distracted
Maybe try a typewriter
@@DisketteKitchen I need to be able to edit things and sync between computers
Having to retype everything to be in a digital format would be a ton of extra work for no reason
@@Shadowflare6pretty sure it was a joke 🤣.
Thats some 4d chess type shit
One of the goals of an efficient and effective IT department is standardization. It's the reason businesses don't buy from a different manufacturer each year or upgrade period. Chromebooks' badness is part of what makes them cheap and easy to admin. Compared to letting everyone bring a mix or to buying a different corporate sell-off each year, chromebooks end up making sense for a school that has to consider the lifetime cost.
They're bad, but they're consistently and equally bad. This saves the school the burden of supporting personal laptops, and it shields them from discrimination complaints where students who are given managed hardware feel it is worse in some way. It's also a TI situation, where a private corporation has weaseled in as a "necessity" in public schools and now we can't extract them without breaking things.
As I wrote in my comment (for reference) I was an intern at a high-school, mostly managing chromebooks. They used like 3-4 different manufacturers and different models from them, so I'd argue the argument of "fairness" doesn't work. I'll agree with the management point, since the school's IT infrastructure was basically wholly moved to google "cloud" services so there was very little they had to do on the management side of things. Then again, if people could use their own laptops, they could access their google accounts anyway.
I... half agree, as a school IT admin.
They are... kind of easy to manage, when they work.
The problems with them come when they stop working, both when the children break them and when the support ends.
Software management is easier; the school can install their own extensions and applications, while also tightly controlling what extensions and applications are allowed to be loaded aside from that, so Chrimebooks being the only allowed devices lets us limit untimely extracurricular activities during class, they can do that on their personal devices at home.
Replacement parts can cost more than buying a new machine, about $3500 was spent recently on a pile of top shells, keyboards, and motherboards for our HP G8/G9 fleet, enough to cover about thirty machines, fifteen of each model, where buying a whole thirty new machines would cost about $4K; if we had to buy displays for them, thankfully we don't, that would easily blow well past $4K. These are eWaste devices, all the way through.
When they end support, the Chromebooks technically keep working, but the longer you keep using it, the more likely things begin to break in the software, and the more of a security risk it becomes for the whole network.
We have a gigantic pile of Dell Chromebook 3180s that are stuck on ChromeOS 103, and they don't work properly with the testing suite anymore, there are massive security holes that have been discovered and patched since then, and most of the parts for these machines don't fit any of the newer machines, except for the displays; the displays out of them fit our Dell 3100s, 3110s, and even the HP G8s and G9s, so we've requisitioned several hundred displays out of the eWaste 3180s, and that has helped keep the repair costs down for the newer machines, one of the few reasons the cost of repair hasn't exceeded the cost to replace.
Chromebooks are just so damn boring! Even a cheap Windows laptop usually has better specs. I see a Chromebook and immediately want to install Linux on it.
They already have Linux installed.
Chromebook user here. Linux is installable in settings and I use it to run Firefox and that's also how you can play steam games and such. They can do a lot if you know how to use them
@CB2C At that point though, just run real linux
@CB2C issue is chromebooks are mostly school laptops, which are heavily managed and thus you usually cannot do jack shit to them
You know chrome books are cheaper than a equivalent cheap windows laptop
Actually in the terms of school we should not be getting kids started on chromebooks when in the real world you WILL be using windows at work hand down no debate, you setting kids up for failure when they can’t operate a computer
Just like having kids use iPads then give them no preparation for real keyboards and mice
I’m a windows user, dabbled in Linux and MacOS, probably a few months away from dual booting Debian on my main system.
What about most occupations guarantee that people “WILL be using windows at work hands down no debate”?
Unless they’re getting in programming or software development, I can’t see how anything a computer oriented job requires you to do can’t be done in a browser. The Chromebooks in the cheap end might be utter shit in accordance to pricing, but the value they save underfunded schools in bulk orders does make a difference
We’re talking about schools spending some 20-30% more on windows laptops that are equally shitty or worse, just for the potential to… “prepare” them, for an increasingly browser based world?
Even billion dollar tech companies I’ve worked under have resources to teach you software basics and IT support on hand because unless you’re in a development position, they don’t expect you to be a computer wizard. Spreadsheets, presentations, emails and virtual conferences, and even specialised tools specific to your work are more than likely available on a browser.
@@singhaxes7810Schools should be buying used laptops off of offices. They could run linux, which is a more capable os than chrome, and the build quality will be better.
Interestingly kids have been using Chromebooks in schools for 5-10 years now depending on the district. So the first kids who know would have used Chromebooks for most of their school years will be entering the work force right about now. We might start seeing a shift where workplaces start deploying Chromebooks to meet workers where their skills are
@@Trainguyrom you overestimate corporate America's care to accommodate and not require basic computer skills
I think it depends on the use case...
I got a chromebook for watching movies, UA-cam and note-taking, and I'm fine with it (I paid like $70 USD)
The browser is just too limiting. The best thing to happen to Chromebooks was android app support, quadrupled the usability of the machines.
Too bad most schools restrict it, I am still begging them to let me use Firefox
I don't get how chromebooks can be so expensive and so bad at the same time. The hardware is very cheap and they don't even need to pay for a windows license.
Also great video, the subscriber count go way up.
I love Chromebooks. My mom's Windows PC needs constant troubleshooting while her Chromebook just works. Best investment I've ever made. If a Chromebook ran Ableton I'd switch to a quality one. Every time i have to interact with Microsoft's abomonation of a system my soul dies a little bit. Performance isn't everything
I see a bunch of people having tons of issues with Windows, but in my like 8 years of using it I've never had it brick itself (I have bricked it a few times, but it was completely my fault or sometimes intentional) and I've only seen like 10 bluescreens (all caused by modified GPU drivers)
Chromebooks are great for older folk, same as Apple computers but a way more reasonable price. It's locked down and secure, good luck messing it up, lol.
Chromebooks are good for older people who only use Netflix and UA-cam. But for adults, who use multiple apps like coding or office, it's pretty bad. I guess a MacBook can be a blanket check as it's simple without those restrictions of a chromebook
At that point just use linux. I also just saw a video about chromeos-based distro that doesn't actually suck and comes with android and linux software support out of the box. Doesn't tie you down to just chrome, doesn't require a google account and etc. So it's just better. (In this case FydeOS, the "freeish" desktop version just requires you to pay on biiig OVA updates and you can update it by hand anyway without paying if you care)
When you describe a software-related issue on a full product critique, you have gotta realize that you're ignoring the rest of the problem. Expandable storage? No. Expandable RAM? No. Adequate reparability? No. Adequate support? No. It can just break at some point due to a software issue and the same issue will stop you from installing a different OS. How fucked is that? On normal hardware you can have even the same OS if you're a google megafan or smth and enjoy the same benefits, while not having the idiotic downsides of the chomebooks' design.
@@mike_dizA cheap, used ThinkPad with Linux will certainly blow any Chromebook out of the water. But Chromebooks are simple and somewhat similar to Android, which many people are used to. Linux on the other hand has quite a learning curve. I‘d always recommend it, but only to someone who‘s actually willing to learn a bit about the OS.
Chromebook user here. Whilst I agree the MAJORITY of Chromebooks suck, they're actually pretty decent if you just buy one with a better processor. I got one with a pentium gold (rather than the atoms or athlons they usually ship with) and I have been able to get through uni with it and it runs much faster than the one you mentioned in the video. Granted it's not perfect and a used windows laptop may be better value, but they aren't all that bad. And Google has launched Chromebook +, with better processors (like i3, i5, i7 ect) and more features.
That’s a fair point, part of what I maybe didn’t get across is just that it’s not just the hardware, but also ChromeOS by itself that’s part of the problem
@DisketteKitchen While ChromeOS is indeed very limited compared to windows, have you ever seen someone who older and isn't tech savy try to use modern windows? Genuinely, the experience is truely aweful for anyone who doesnt use computers on a regular basis.
My dad, who is in his mid 50s, was unable to get past the captcha on a new Windows 11 laptop he purchased because it forced him into making a new microsoft account... So he returned it and bought a chromebook. all he wanted to do was create a new resume, so he bought a chromebook and moved on with his life since the long term performance or specs were not really important to him.
Sometimes specs are not a consideration at all for the end user, its whether or not the device works at all for them. I hope this perspective is useful, keep up the good work!
@@dylancrockett20 Linux mint
@@VelvetelToo Are there any devices with Linux mint pre-installed?
@@DundG i wish
I agree for use cases you talk about, but my parents have trouble with the different layers of abstraction that come with a regular pc. The fact that a browser has different rules than the regular window manager, for example. Switching them to chromebooks has cut down on parental tech support massively.
can't screw it up if it's just a web browser and android tablet glued together.
I don't disagree that they're useful, but at the same time I wish there was a version that allowed you to use a better browser, like firefox or librewolf, etc.
I get why these have become the norm, and I may have narrowly missed their distribution in my personal public school experience being 30.
BUT DAMN.
The unanticipated consequence of this generation of Chromebook users entering the work place, in my experience, has been a new wave of hires that are as equally scared and unfamiliar with Windows UI and Office Suite apps as the 50+ crowd. Of course I'm generalizing, but this is definitely a broad trend.
American public education is famously awful, but if it did anything right it prepared people to competently sit in front of a screen for 9 hours a day.
Definitely not a norm in the circles I have been, currently in university and nowhere during my Ms/hs years have I seen someone have one as a personal device and the only time I encountered them was an external Instances loan choice.
hey, heads up for the graphs: in resolution, 4k is measuring the number of pixels in width, while 1080p, 720p, etc. measure the number of pixels in height. for measurement accuracy, 4k should be represented by 2160p instead
Thats good to remember, technically this was just generally a bad use for a graph when “4K” isn’t oven 4,000 pixels wide
@@DisketteKitchen 3840
few things i really hate chromebooks and chrome os in general:
1. installing other OS is proven to be more tricky than normal PC. imagine you need to disassemble to just remove write protection & not only that, you need to find custom BIOS to install other OS. if you successfully booted to windows/standard linux, lot of things not compatible.
2. virtualizing chrome os. yeah there is Fyde & works in VMWare BUT i want to try vanilla chrome os flex. they always don't work. i've tried vmware, virtualbox & even QEMU, none of them working!
3. keyboard. i'm not talking about the typing quality but the layout. why no super key? why the caps lock key replaced by search?
Search is the super key
I use a $130 Chromebook as a typing machine and it's wonderful. They're also perfect youtube and web consumption machines for my parents and my grandfather. Most people don't need a powerhouse, in fact, especially older people with no tech background, and making them run windows or linux should be considered elder abuse
this was a real learning experience for me. got me with the title, hooked me with the data. hope your channel will continue to grow; one of the best videos i've seen all year
I bought a cheap acer c720 chromebook back in 2014. I believe google was subsidizing the hardware in an attempt to gain adaption, so it was under $100 new. I immediately wiped it and installed various linux distros on that thing for years. At that time, it was the perfect school machine. It had enough power to get school work done, but not really enough power to do anything too distracting.
It definitely feels like they’ve gotten worse as well
@@DisketteKitchen it's been 10 years since I got a new laptop, was planning on doing the same thing, but decided on getting an off lease elitebook.
The use of chromebooks in schools is a prime example of equality vs equity - equality is giving everyone the same baseline - aka a shitty chromebook - while equity targets those most affected by inequality and dedicates resources specifically to them - i.e. giving better computers to students without them.
Lol, not really. More just not wanting to invest in the right tools.
I thought a chromebook was a good idea for my grandma because there's a minimal amount of things she could accidentally mess up
It is, just get her one with 8GB of ram minimum because the Play Store (which you can disable, but then you lose acess to android apps) eats it up. Either go with an ARM cpu for battery life and good app usage (bonus, these usually do not need fans so no maintenance needed whatsoever), or an Intel cpu for power and Linux but less battery and mandatory fans (plus, it's heavier).
12:32 I agree with you on this point so much. The school is spending more and providing a worse experience by not focusing on those who really need the laptop instead of giving them out to everyone
I spent five years as the senior technician at one of the biggest Chromebook suppliers in the country.
They. Are. Terrible. How they are still relevant is insane, and disgusting.
Windows has the same bugs for decades. Lol, it's clock can't even stay current. How is something that buggy still relevant?
As someone who had to use them in the office, it was an absolute nightmare, constant freezes, memory leak issues, etc. Probably cut our productivity in half.
Sounds like my experience with Windows.
There is one very specific reason I am considering buying a Chromebook. From my understanding Chromebooks are capable of using android apps. Likewise they are able purchase things off of the google play store. I use a google pixel 8 for my phone and I use calyx os instead of stock android for privacy and security reasons. Due to this it runs the Aurora store which is a front end for google play that allows me to anonymously download which app I want as long as it's free. I can also download paid apps if I temporarily sign in to a google account that has already purchased said app. My major issue I cannot actually purchase an app on Aurora. I would either need to revert to stock android or have a second device with it. The former is out of the question and a Chromebook as a toy seems more appealing to me than an old android phone.
You can install android on most amd64 laptops
Knock yourself out, you'll love the Chromebook. They're more usedul than Android tablets and the weasel in the video didn't use a good one on purpose. He also didn't showcase the full capabilities of the Chromebook either. For instance, he didn't show that a fast and newer one could replace an Android tablet since you can use their apps. He didn't show linux capabilities and using snap. Hes a Microsoft shill.
You CAN have an android subsystem on any(ish) linux distro. (Also an emulator or vm y'know) I'd say give that a try before anything else. I'm planning on playing around with it myself.
Sent from LineageOS 💪
Also you can use FydeOS, ChromeOS (or is it ChromiumOS) based distro, also comes with android subsystem as well as the ability to run linux software. So definitely better than just stock ChromeOS. And can be installed on any (?) hardware, not just chromebooks
@@mike_diz I was not aware that an open source chromium os was a thing. Let alone forks like fyde. I'll check these out. Thanks for the tip bro.
@@MrJhwan well it IS linux based so it kinda has to be open-source by license. But google is pretty nice regarding open-sourcing stuff, ironically. I mean android is open-source as well (also kinda has to be by license imma guess since yet again it's based on linux) so it kinda makes sense that if one is os (I'm tired of writing open-source and yet I wrote it again here) then so would be the other.
Dude picks garbage Chrome ooks then complains that they're garbage. Meanwhile, windows is so bloated that people struggle to create smaller and lighter versions of the garbage OS just so their conputers don't lag but then run into major problems later on because its so gutted.
I can see why that Samsung is struggling to play on the Chromebook.
It has an old integrated graphics chip that can only play older video codecs while UA-cam has recently been pushing the newer AV1 codec.
Without a proper hardware decoder, video playback tends to fallback on software decoding, and this is much more computationally intensive.
A relatively simple workaround is installing a plugin like h264-ify to forcibly disable AV1 video playback and make YT fall back on using VP9 or H264
yes chromebooks don't make sense. they should cost alot less than they do. they are probably marketed towards administrators seeing how the only "good" feature they have is the remote management. all that being said i currently have six of them. the features that make me use them are open documented bios and embeded controllers, which i think is neat, not necessarily useful for most people. all the ones i'm using are using ultra low power cpus from 2016 so they're not very fast but can still handle anything except adds. does anyone know if they is a browser extension that limits cpu useage of adds?
ublock origin (lite ver only now because google)
Chromebooks used to be amazing, then they focused on schools and drives the price all the up and then it become trash. Back in 2017 it was good
Were they amazing? They're Chrome OS. Chrome OS sucks ass.
Hardware-wise, maybe.
@@existenceispain_geekthesiren nothing wrong with chrome os if your not requiring anything other then a web browser if you ask for more then your getting outside the box of what it's designed to do
@@RhythmGamer Sure, but it's competing against OSes that CAN do more than web browse. Against actual OSes, it loses by a massive margin.
@@existenceispain_geekthesiren sure but it’s not “competing” with anyone that would be dumb. It was not designed to more than a web browser.
Fundamentally 2 separate sides of a coin and a welcomed change. If you still want windows or whatever that’s fine but the mass majority of people really don’t do anything with there computers other then a web browser. To the point that most people don’t even buy new computers and have moved to tablets and the lot.
First, even with Chromebooks, specs still matter. And schools tend to buy dog shit when it comes to computers. and even Chrome OS will chug along. I get that it's probably the only Chromebook you had access to...still an unfair comparison when comparing a school Chromebook with Thinkpads, even if they're a few years old.
Secondly, people can see PCs and Macs as their own separate thing, but when it comes to Chromebooks, they're constantly compared to the two. That's also unfair as Chrome OS does offer plenty of value still. Yes, it was once a useless browser based system. But with Android apps integration, the right machine can definitely stand on its own merits. When you consider how much we use our phones, being on a system with a similar ecosystem can be important to some people. Being a constant Samsung Dex user, I certainly understand the value.
My school issued Chromebook in my senior year of high school was pretty good tbh.
No weird hardware faults, plenty fast, got the job done, compact.
Chromebooks are actually a great little puzzle gift to give to a very technical person. The challenge is to install proper Linux on it and then rice it to be just as intuitive as the admittedly pretty damn good Chromebook UI.
And that's primarily how I think about them. Devices to practice things that could well brick a device without fear of spending a ton.
Not if the device softlocks itself before allowing you to actually unlock the bootloader without industry tools 🤩
no. kids need laptops and they're going to break them no matter what, if they're $200 or $2,000
My first Chromebook lasted 12 years before dying!
Something else to add
My school has these Lenovo things that have the specs of a Chromebook yet they have windows on them and it takes 10 minutes to sign in and another 10 to sign out
When i was in school, we got little ubuntu machines. They usually never had any performance problems and we would learn about open source software early on
My grandma used a windows pc and it was time to replace it. Got her a Chromebook because all she does is use the web. No complaints
This is a bad comparison. You take a $200 laptop that you likely didn't choose the model of to get a form factor and keyboard you like and then compare it to latops in the ~$1000+ price range.
Additionally, Linux is not about being lightweight, fast, or having a customizeable interface. The Linux kernel is heavyweight as it is a kernel designed for general purpose use cases. All of this extra complexity makes it much heavier than the lighterweight kernels you may find for embedded devices. While performance is important it is in fact limited by the hardware. A kernel can't magically make your hardware go faster. Linux itself doesn't have a user interface other than the capability of showing a terminal. It requires other compoents to provide a user interface.
This video also fails to mention the security of Chromebooks as they are one of the most secure laptops you can buy. Both from a hardware and sodtware perspective.
Hell no. Literally any old laptop is a better option.
Before I got a job and got my own ROG Strix laptop, I was chugging a 15 year old Lenovo Thinkpad. I absolutely adored it.
I could run Minecraft Bedrock and Java at the same time on the laptop screen AND an external monitor. I even tried stress testing it in my young mind's way by setting up some redstone to blow up about 1K tnt each screen (heck, I even had shaders on the Java instance of Minecraft).
It fell off of the counter multiple times (it even had a disk drive and not an SSD and no option for one), it had been blessed by multiple slurpings of Ramen Noodles, it had a cup of water splash on the keyboard, the J key broke off so I put the ` key in its place, and a single fan in the computer slapped on the CPU that could blow at stupid speeds. It was incredible how it had survived so long.
Even then, it still can crank a few 90's in bedwars even too lol
Wym "no option for SSD"? Don't they (thinkpads) just use SATA 3 connections?
When I started 6th grade in 2015 I got a brand new MacBook Air, so did every other 6-12th grade student. That would probably be about 800 MBAs lended out to students for use during the school year. Now my rural small town school district has some “funding allocation issues” that cause the Superintendent to accidentally get a 6 figure salary and pay the teachers less than a Walmart worker but in the end we all got a mid-spec MacBook Air for the next 4 years. In 2019 for my 10th grade year they were replaced with 6th gen iPads, no keyboards, no nothing. We were almost begging for Chromebooks because writing 4 page psychology papers on an iPad virtual keyboard is hell. Most of us who cared/could afford to bought laptops for our 11th and 12th grade year because some kids had basically had their personal computer taken from them. I know some people who TO THIS DAY haven’t owned a personal computer since. I think now they at least give the kids keyboards with the new iPads they got the school year after I graduated but a tablet cannot replace the experience of a laptop.
It's clear your school went for bargain basement, seems like you got the slowest single core cacheless Chromebook out there.
Ironically, this is the nicest model they have at my school
@@DisketteKitchen just proves the commenter's point, doesn't it?
Everytime I learn a caller at my center has a Chromebook, it goes downhill. It's even worse, because most are not tech literate enough to understand what that means. They just say "It's an HP."
Yes, you have purchased a HP with a half working operating system.
You should have run these tests on an unmanaged ChromeOS install, the enterprise restrictions significantly affects the performance. Of course the loading speed is much longer, they're running your traffic through a proxy with a heavy amount of checking and a lot of usage. The laptops are bought in bulk, so the school is getting it for much cheaper than the selling price.
This was best case, given it was on my home WiFi and the school only blocks sites through their network, plus part of my point is that they shouldn’t be used in schools
@@DisketteKitchenAgain, most people dont use Chromebooks in a home or office environment, i dont know why schools use them unless they signed a contract for a long time
@@IMX383 They use it for the very management software that is unfourtunately also bogging down a lot of the performance. Having the entire OS be essentially one tiny container of a web browser is like a breath of fresh air compared to the shitshow of trying to lock down Windows.
I sometimes think that the way technology is taught in school is detrimental to kids' acquisition of IT skills. iPads in school, while great for digital art classes and handwriting in math classes (if you can trust kids not to lose an Apple pencil... Darwin knows how often I lose and find mine), aren't really as capable (especially the lower end models), and unless the school shells out a lot for keyboard cases to convert them into iOS laptops, they'll miss out on typing practice. At least you get that on a Chromebook, but a Chromebook has a very crappy way of handling what little local storage it offers you, and every program you use is either an HTML "Web app" or the same Web app offline. Kids don't really learn about how to manage a file system, how to use programs that are stored in local storage, or even how to use Windows or MacOS, which have more in common with each other these days than they do with ChromeOS.
Schools will drop everything to teach what they think is the "latest and greatest" like a crappy netbook that you can't use without a Google account, and that forces you to put whatever you can in the cloud. Kids wind up thinking that you can't even use a computer without going online. There's less coverage of the software that they'll likely be able to make a job out of - no coverage of Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint (not the limited online versions), no MATLAB or any kind of advanced calculation programs that can run outside the cloud, no professional CAD that runs in the box, no full versions of Photoshop or even Ableton or Pro Tools. No opportunities to learn SQL or Python right on your system. No KiCAD. Not even Audacity.
The way I see it, the standardization of Chromebooks and iPads in school IT essentially prioritizes trends in consumer electronics among those who'd never use a laptop for fun over teaching kids useful IT skills.
Keyboarding has been cut and now kids can't even type very efficiently. There's this idea that contemporary tech is easy, that it's designed to be easy, and that kids don't really need to learn it on a deeper level or learn to type since they already know. But most kids don't even use computers anymore unless their families are well-off and they're into PC gaming, music production, animation, video editing, CAD, etc., etc. They use smartphones with tiny keyboards, tablets/iPads, etc. and never really learn to type.
And then, these Gen Z'ers who don't even really seem to care about computers in the slightest, whose only experience using them is on some neutered version of Linux and/or stripped down touchscreen macOS, are the ones who hunt and peck their college essays, struggle with computers in the office, never bother to learn MS Excel, etc.
Would you let someone drive a bus without a license since they drove around eScooters and electric quads as a kid, or because they got to drive a tractor around the family farm occasionally? Would that mean they're already a great driver? Would such a person be trusted with the additional controls of an excavator at a construction site? Should we just say "hey, driving is easy, let's not bother to prepare kids for the road, they already know it and they depend on it!"? NO!
I've never used a chromebook so maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but why isn't it possible to use MATLAB, python, CAD software, etc. on a chromebook? All of these are doable on linux machines
I don't think that you mean Gen Z but that you actually mean Gen Alpha seeing that I, like many of my peers, grew up with actual Desktop computers and Laptops, IOS and Windows machines (mostly the latter where I come from) and still had typing classes in Middle School. And I am 24, a Uni student and in the oldest bracket of Gen Z.
@@tracervullet8667chromeos when managed by an organization (as schools do) cannot install any programs from a file and, importantly, cannot run any programs that are not in the google play store. Many schools go further and even disable the playstore, locking the users of the chromebooks into just the browser and web-based apps.
@@tracervullet8667not in ChromeOS itself
I go to an iPad high school and the level of competency with computers is astoundingly bad. It was honestly kind of shocking realising just how poor IT skills are in kids coming from a family of computer nerds.
I've never liked the used Chromebook I had, and what's worse is that it was so old it never got the android app support before reaching EOL. I ended up modding it with the MrChromeBox EFI firmware a couple months ago and I'm kinda thankful it uses the same charger as my good laptop.
I think a lot of the concern with BYOD in schools is the lack of control. Sure you can block certain websites on the school internet but what's to stop the kid from going home installing a VPN and then becoming unrestricted at school. Then there's the issue of students demanding help from school IT to fix their personal laptops which is a total nightmare and then having to deal with the Karen mom when we tell her we don't do that. Source I'm in IT at a university
I wouldnt be surprised if school's got a very nice discount by buying Chromebooks in bulk or by just by letting them be the sole provider of school laptops.
Honestly I think the real problem stems from it just not really teaching how to use a computer. Kids would struggle with with basic Windows systems, much more if they were forced to use Linux for work.
I like to think of them as the underpowered, cheapo version of a Mac, but atleast Apple has a thriving, if expensive, ecosystem to integrate with. Google has...uh...
Almost fifteen seconds to load a website on a device defined by one of the most giant Internet giants is almost as funny as said device being made under the same parent company as UA-cam but struggling to play those videos.
Nice vid! Also, that frog fabric reminds me of a cat fabric I got as a kid and have never figured out a worthy enough use for haha
It’s literally a device made for web browsing, which is what impressed me so much, also I have a cat version of the frogs, so it’s probably the same
Only reason is if it was an OLED panel on sale for media and stuff. You can use superdisplay to make them a secondary PC monitor too.
an old $40 used chromebook is a great thing to have -- i think i have one in just about every room of my house. i also use them when i am taking a bath since -- if they fall in the water -- no big deal. they're not updated and sometimes a website refuses to load on it, but it's a nice disposable laptop
When I used my Chromebook. Battery cheated! IT'S NOT EVEN FAIR!!!! IT WENT FROM 100% TO 94%, THEN 2%.
It sucks because it's not fair.
It super sucks.
10 year support, fool proof, Android support, detachable keyboard. Not that bad to have one next to a few Windows and Linux laptops.
you really made a video about how shittiest celeron is worse than old i5
Dude is just a biased, dirty, nerdy liar with 0 fashion sense. I didn't think dudes like him were real. I mean, what is that ugly shirt? I wanted to hear some valid criticisms but instead I heard this list of garbage.
I am one of the fortunate few that had a PowerBook or MacBook program in Middle school. It taught me Mac OS and its weird quirks. Every student got a powerbook unless they elected to purchase a MacBook which was subsidized to have a lower cost. It was locked down but parents/students got the admin rights after graduation and proceeded to use them until college. But what ultimately killed the take home program (they still kept units on site for a per class need basis) is REPAIR costs. People constantly broke these units (though they were repairable - Apple was different then) it was still costly - and that's the part about Chromebooks. They are so cheap- that replacing the unit is far cheaper than parts and labor.
I agree though - Chromebooks in general (barring highest end Chromebooks) kinda suck- mainly for the ewaste and life span reasons mentioned along with price to performance ratio. Pixelbooks seem to be really well made though.
Oh what I would give to have a MacBook at school
It was great- we also figured out how to Jailbreak em partially- install proxies and play flash games 😂. I think modern solution in the district is iPad deployment with a rugged keyboard case.
Question: Are there any Linux distros you can recommend for a Chromebook? Is there ANY possibility to use the capability of the touchscreen in Linux?
My father gifted me the "Acer Chromebook Spin (CP311-3H)" because he has no use for it and I figured I could use it as a light laptop for university. I never really used Linux before and want to go into it now.
I just need it to run a browser, a editor like word to run, and a pdf reader and maybe something to draw! Any other need is covered by my more powerfull devices.
Thanks in advance :)
any distro with gnome will help you
Basically any distro works with touchscreen these days, but GNOME or maybe cosmic desktop environments are probably the most usable
Thanks to both! But I realized I only have 4GB of total storage available, which seems to not work on most distros, except for the very lightweight ones that also seem to lack integrated touchscreen support.
I think I gonna use it for now with chrome OS to see how I use it and if I really need the touchscreen support. If not I might consider Puppy Linux or some other Lightweight solution or maybe I even take the time to calibrate the touchscreen support myself if I find the time.
Anyway, I will try out Linux regardles through virtual Box and see what fancys me!
I was doing an internship at some high-school along with a few other people and more than half the time we were fixing broken chromebooks. The worst offender was when they just refused to boot, saying that there is no wifi, even though it was connected. I tried unlocking a few but they can't even be unlocked without internet. Considering they have no ethernet port. I tried using a hotspot: nothing. I should've tried usb tethering, alas I didn't think of it at the time. It's like after a certain date they just become unusable. We couldn't even strip them for parts because all of this class (there were different manufacturers and models) had the same issue. So they are actually just trash.
Meanwhile there were also a few thinkpads with pretty decent hardware so we put SSDs in them, installed whatever the labs needed and rolled them out.
In conclusion, fuck chromebooks
Years ago I considered a Chromebook because of the price. Then I remembered I don't want more, but less dependency on Google and didn't buy one. I also needed better specs not that much later so I'm glad I just got a laptop with better specs immediately. Turned out the university also banned Chromebooks from even connecting with their network. They got locked into a contract with Google for their e-mail support and have since gotten rid of it.
Using Google laptops in schools makes not a lot of sense considering Google doesn't give an F about any kind of privacy. I'm slowly phasing out of Google as much as I can, which isn't as much as I want to.
I have nothing wrong with chromebooks theoretically, but oh my god the fact that kids aren't trusted with windows machines in schools makes some of the youngins completely computer illiterate.
My family had a chromebook briefly when my brothers and I were in high school. All I did was watch videos, use Discord, and do online quizzes/tests. I literally hated that thing so much. I _dreaded_ anytime I had to use it. So slow for no reason.
how many thinkpads do you own in total
I’ve lost track
i did the octane bench mark on my computer while watching youtube and i got 3432 it could be becuase my computer has a pentium or becuase im using windows 8.1. i still prefer this then chromeos
It’s good for my mother who _only_ wants a laptop for what Chromebooks were originally designed to be; a simple & reliable web browser with a screen, speakers, keyboard, & trackpad wrapped around it.
I really wish Chromebooks were better, I've been wanting a typewriter experience for writing and chrome books seem ideal for this but I just can't justify a few hundred bucks for something that would be so miserable to use.
This Chromebook you’re describing is way better than my 3 year old school Chromebook.
I bought a Chromebook for $50 few years back, put Windows 10 on it, replaced the Wifi/bluetooth module with an NVME SSD, and it's been the best damn laptop. Cheap, light...cheap. I play GTR2 on it. I watch movies. I do game dev stuff. It's actually fine.
I have no idea what a Chromebook would accomplish that my $70 mid 2011 MacBook Air couldn’t do.
It is pretty slow on MacOS but with Linux it is pretty responsive, and it will stream video, do video calls, steam in home streaming, office software. Isn’t that the stuff a Chromebook is supposed to be doing?
Linux is truly the savior of old computers I’ve got Debian on most of my 2010 iMacs at this point
This is relaxing to me, maybe its your cadence or your way of pronouncing words?
idk, great job
Bro those prices for Thinkpads are dope, in my country are really hard to fin new or used for that proce. Nice vid :D
Would loved if you mentioned first the flexibility of the windows system for the non computer geeks
The best for me and the worst:
Windows Laptop: Not the worst, but the best!
Macbook: Ok
Linux Laptop: Also ok
Chromebook: Not the best, but the worst!
So I definitely get the case against schools buying Chromebooks (and am inclined to agree) but I think your Chromebook experience is far from universal. I have an Asus CM34 Flip that I got for ~$250, specifically because I didn't want to take an expensive, bulky, or particularly fragile laptop to classes. The screen is nice; it has a long battery life and charges quickly; and it does any sort of web browsing I need it to do. The Linux support with Crostini is also decent, though not ideal. Of course, I also have a desktop and wouldn't want it to be my **only** computer, but I don't feel like I would be much better off with a ~$250 Windows laptop. And good luck getting any Mac for that price.
While I agree generally with your main argument, I have some small nitpicks or things that might warrant considering from the perspective of someone who has seen both sides of low end device deployment.
Usability vs Scalability:
100% giving every student a Chromebook is a disservice if the intended goal is learning how to properly and efficiently use the machine. However, most of the time the intended goal is to just be sure everyone has a device that can roughly follow the curriculum. In a lot of high schools, any use case more intensive than browser use (such as your mentioned graphic design course) will likely have a lab that can have a high power machine which is usable by 5-10 students per device. Doing this is also an easy way to avoid logistics hell, which is an unfourtunate side effect to your proposed solution of just buying laptops for students that need them. For schools that have a couple thousand or more students, doing so is just not worth the man hours. And this is before needing to work around students who may initially be able to supply their own laptop, but for some circumstancial reason might need one later on. This would create the need for having spares on hand, which defeats the purpose of being able to buy less machines.
Cost, Repairability, and Cherry-Picking:
One other major point of your was cost, but I think you either missed or left off a couple points. First, you point out that the Lenovo machines are cheaper when secondhand, but what looks like the list price for the Chromebook doesn't take into account bulk pricing that the school most likely gets, which increases at higher volumes. Additionally, since they are cheaper devices that are still relatively modular, if one breaks like yours did it would be far less painful on the budget to just rip the guts out of a different one and swap it back in. And that's not even taking account the state that I saw a painful amount of the working Chomebooks my peers had, where the device still working through all the crumbs and food dust is frankly a miracle.
This is more of a minor nitpick, but the whole "It's ChromeOS so it uses Chrome even if other browsers are an option" thing seemed like a bit of a bad-faith after just saying Edge was not going to be forced on Windows simply because it was pre-installed with the OS.
The "Standard User":
One thing that might have been good to ask alongside whether people own a laptop is what they use it for. Having worked in a couple different support-esque positions, I've seen that most people legitimately do have the Chromebook use case of "if it runs the web browser I'm fine". As much as it may be insane to you and I that people don't understand stuff in the digital age, most people aren't interested in turbo-optimizing their typing speed, their time between pages, or losing a second or two on the cheap computer they use to do the homework assignment on for an hour in a day.
Again, I think what Chromebooks have become is a painful waste of potential. ChromeOS Flex is amazing at breathing new life into machines that get massacred by Windows, and ChromeOS is so much more approachable than any standard form of Linux for anyone who barely even understands how a filesystem works and doesn't want to spend hours learning and troubleshooting new issues. eMMc is a joke of a technology that should never be used in a computing device, even super low low cost devices could get away with using some sort of decent flash memory to bring up the entire experience like SSDs did when everyone still used HDDs. Discounting Chromebooks for "Everyone" though (yes I know clickbait title, but the point is still there) discounts a lot of legitimately good ways that super cheap laptops can still provide value to the average person.
To help improve the hardware of Chromebooks, Google has set standards for Chromebook Plus models. They're built to be easy laptops for people who aren't very tech savy. For most high schools a basic Chromebook is more than enough.
At my school we're forced to use chrombooks too. Accept I got ahold of an employees network login so I just use my personal laptop, lol. As a robotics club captain I kinda need a laptop anyways to do basic shit
I literally just tested a PC i made out of JUNK with an Athlon 2 and a GTS 250 on Windows 7 for a Video.
That‘s a system that would roughly be over 10 years old. And it can play 1080p fullscreen EASY. 😂
Chromebooks are literal, manufactured, eWaste.
Great video mate. ❤
Gonna check out more of your stuff.
I had a desktop with the exact same specs for years. It didn’t do too well on geekbench, but everyday stuff was much snappier than it should have been. The Athlon was a good CPU for its time.
Your are comparing Apples and Oranges here. A Chromebook is NOT MEANT as a primary machine for people like you who have 3D printers and a studio setup worth thousands and thousands of Dollars / Euros / Rubles.
First things first: of course you probably are going to have a shitty experience with the cheapest Chromebooks. Just like you are going to have a shitty experience - even shittier I'd say - with the Windows Laptops in that price range. The cheapest MacBook Air right now is 1.100 USD. The cheapest Chromebooks are about 200. That difference has to come from somewhere.
Comparing an i5 chip to a celeron (or below) and finding it faster is like being surprised a 10 year old mid class BMW with a 200 HP engine is nicer, roomier and quicker than a brand new Mitsubishi Mirage with a 1.2 liter three cylinder engine. There is NO point. Different devices built for different purposes and price ranges.
If you are Tech-savvy, of course you will be able to do much more with a used couple-of-year-old ThinkPad + Linux for the same amount of money. No discussion. But Chromebooks are not meant for you.
But there are very nice mid-tier Chromebooks out there that do offer i3 / i5 chipsets, sufficient RAM and storage that will give you a great user experience.
In the private market, they are meant for people who have neither the knowledge nor inclination to learn about computers. They are meant for your Grandma / -pa. For your aunt who doesn't know the first thing about computers. For people who really only need access to their Google Mail etc. They don't know or care about security or privacy and as long as screens open reasonably fast, they don't care about performance either.
They are also for organizations who want computers they can easily secure and administrate with users who are not really tech savvy and who just want to work. Work for those people means reading and responding to mails, chat, create documents and use other web applications. They love the good screens on the mid-class Chromebooks. They love that the battery lasts all day. They love they are not bugged with updates. They love that they can JUST WORK on those devices.
No ChromeOS machine has yet fallen victim to malware. Not a single one. Because it doesn't work (90+% of malware is written for Windows) AND because the security on those machines is the best out-of-box-security you will find on the market right now.
And as an Admin of an SMB I can tell you, people treat their devices like shit. Throw them down stairs, pour coffee in them, put pens on the keyboard and then close the lid... just to name a few things. What do you think I prefer as an Admin? A Windows laptop that costs me 800-900 Euros each time to replace those machines and then spend half a day to set them up and enroll them in Intune and update them? Or do you think I rather prefer to give my users machines of half that price that are set up, enrolled, updated and ready to use in under ten minutes?
Are they for Engineers who have to do 3D modeling / CAD? Hell no! Are they for people who do a lot of Audio / Video / Photo editing? Hell no! Are they for hard core gamers? Hell no!
But just because you don't see the value, doesn't mean there is none. Choose the right tool for the job.
there are so many of them being thrown away by schools, it's a one time laptop
Well not one time, but there're only so many spare parts (aka monitors and keyboards, the rest is soldered on) to fix the broken ones so the e-waste sure piles up 😃 truly an amazing product
Dislikes are from Chromebook lovers.
I own a Chromebook - Granted it's because I found it at a thrift store for next to nothing....
I definitely wouldn't have spent real money on one.
When I was in high school the first chrome book I was given stopped working in class and the teacher sent me to the library to get a new one and I made sure to pick the nicest looking one that they had and fortunately it lasted.
Now that I’m in college as a remote student the classes I need are in a campus that’s too far away from where I live. I was asked if I wanted a computer or use my own I chose to use my own computer that I built in January it beats anything that they could have given me.
Oh man. Whenever I see one of those small laptops with one of those Pentium or Athlon's, I know that the experience is going to suck.
Only time it ever make sense to pull the trigger on such a unit is if a deal on one comes with a Ryzen 3/Intel i3 or Ryzen 5/Intel i5. It won't be the craziest of things, but good lord the difference is night and day.
This video was randomly recommended to me... But on that topic, a few months ago an elederly neighbor needed a need laptop and asked me for some recommendations and first thing I said just not a Chromebook and he's answer was your first one 🤣 He is far from a computer person, but he even knew how bad they were.
The other neighbor though not so lucky, her mother ordered a new laptop and they said it was so slow on setup and they couldn't figure it out, I assumed it was windows, until she started describing what she seen on the screen.. And I'm like you need to return that... Mainly because her mother uses software that is windows based. This happens way too often with the elderly not knowing its a chrome book and just thinking its a windows laptop that they are used to.
Yes Chromebooks have a place, but 90% of the time its not it, like in your video just get some older used laptop and you'll come out loads better.
I received a laptop for birthday gift in 2017, the same one i'm using today, the Lenovo B490 with a intel core i3-3110M and 4GB of RAM as well as a 500 GB Seagate hard drive, 13 and half inches screen or so. It costed approximately 90$ adjusted for inflation today and has been overall better than the average national brand OEM several years after and offered me upgradability in the form of an SSD and 8GB of RAM. Also did i mention it runs Windows 10? Not a great outlook for Chromebooks at all on the other hand.
Great comparison, finally someone who doesn't limit the good laptop because the bad laptop doesn't have the same features (which shows the opposite of real world performance)
Speedometer 3 on my Lenovo Chromebook Plus gives around the same result as your T580.
I remember a ways back Samsung made a super swanky $1100 chromebook.
The finest news reading and urgent email answering machine that does nothing else.
The executive breakfast and airplane laptop (their daily driver is a bigger laptop that never leaves their desk)
The graph images are broken on your webpage at present.
It was an issue with chrome, but is fixed now
Holy shit, this channel just got recommended to me and it’s exactly the kind of stuff I’m into. Quite the rabbit hole of videos for me to go through now :D
Forget laptops, it sounds like these things are somehow less functional than just an Android Tablet.
If you wanted to do another test, it'd be interesting to see how Chromebooks compare to an android tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard. Since that would be in the same price category.
There should be a standard for performance and build quality under which a laptop can not be sold. Perhaps even certain feautures reauired for a given pricepoint. I am tired of manufacturers having streight up trash for all budget tiers and expensive laptops with gaping flaws
When I was in 10th or 11th grade I believe that was the year my school made the switch from Chromebooks to Windows laptops. Granted, the Windows laptops were ass too as they could only play Touhou Project at 30fps.
Chromebook ✖
Crapbook ✅
Spybook ✅
7:40 This is something about chromebooks. I really doubt the page load times are so different just because of CPU. I'm willing to bet that the wifi chips play a role here. Hardware makers see chromebooks as an opportunity to include the shittiest internals ever. So 90% sure this is because the chromebook's wifi chip is shit.
I just wish there were low cost options with non Google locked down linux out of the box
Chromebooks are great value if you get them second hand. Im on a very old Acer730e chromebook objectively terrible specs. It still runs fine, its light, small and has good battery life because the battery are easy to find and replace. Instead of running chrome OS I run fedora linux which allows me to use it like a computer. I brought this chromebook for cost of 1 uber eats meals. It can run 5000 fish at smooth fps. It runs a text editor and a web browser which is all i need it for.
I'm not really a big fan of Chromebooks myself, but I think this point is rather flawed. You're comparing all of this to a 3 - 5 year old laptop, but Chromebooks have changed quite a bit recently. With the launch of the Chromebook Plus Chromebooks, they're actually not that bad now. These laptops have decent specs for a decent price, definitely much better than the one singular Chromebook you compared these to. And as many things today (or at least in school) are web based, there's really not a need for anything more than just a Chromebook. So pretty much, my point is that Chromebooks really aren't that bad anymore
I've been, and still am a student when chromebooks were starting to exist in education. As a youngin, I didn't care about the speed. But now that I have fast PC and laptop (the latter i got from a school for 80$), I now see the changes in speed. It can't even keep up with my typing! I don't type that fast, and it lags when I type. If you have a google doc, slide presentation, and wikipedia, it's barely usable, and it lags. These pieces of garbage are replacing compitent computers that can't run windows 11 because of TPM 2.0.
I really liked my lenovo duet comvertible tablet thing, but despite a long support life, a recent update made it unusable. I do have a desktop mac so i got an ipac mini to pair with it instead. Its too bad, with appropriate expectations, my lenovo duet was ok for quite a while. Maybe i will charge it back up and see if there is a new update that has un-ruined it
If you are considering a Chromebook just get an iPad with a keyboard and you got a way better computer. My School for example got iPad 9th gen for all Students although without a keyboard (except for teachers they also get a keyboard case) but even at this state its better than a Chromebook and similarly cheap.
I like your colorful apron.
shouldve thrown in the 13 inch mid 2012 macbook pro unibody as well
I wish I had one