Chromebook

[cornerstones]

Anyone bought a chromebook? Any difference between Chromebook and normal laptop?

 

[12122012]

laptops are far stronger and snappier than chromebooks. Most of today’s laptops are powered by Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and come with 4 GB of RAM, as well as 128 GB SSDs. Chromebooks, on the other hand, feature Intel Atom processors, 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB SSDs.

 

[royfrosty]

Chromebooks are not based on atom.

They are base on a haswell celeron. Only samsung uses their own cpu which is their exynos chip. Iirc there is 1 brand that uses nvidia tegra.

And chromebook is as snappy as a laptop. Just not on the processing power. But on the os responsiveness is great.

 

[cornerstones]

Wow seems like a lot of difference in specs. Laptops look much more sophisticated.

 

[royfrosty]

Wow seems like a lot of difference in specs. Laptops look much more sophisticated.

Definitely. Some chromebook has build in batteries also. Which i personally find it crap. Pnce it reaches its lifespan you probably got to be on ac at all times.

Laptop will offer much closer to a pc abilities imo.

Chromebook on the other hand is to surf websites and watch some videos. Videos also only certain codecs. Cant install codecs. Cant run. Exe files also. Can do simple word processing. Check gmail. And thats pretty much about it.

 

[xuan87]

Definitely. Some chromebook has build in batteries also. Which i personally find it crap. Pnce it reaches its lifespan you probably got to be on ac at all times.

Laptop will offer much closer to a pc abilities imo.

Chromebook on the other hand is to surf websites and watch some videos. Videos also only certain codecs. Cant install codecs. Cant run. Exe files also. Can do simple word processing. Check gmail. And thats pretty much about it.

Actually, chromebooks can do more than that. For example, it can do basic photo editing too. For full list, you need to read up more. In the future, chromebooks will be even be able to do much more as developers are constantly adding more and more apps to the ChromeOS webstore. More and more hardware vendors are coming out in support of chromebooks too so I think chromebooks' future are rosy. For ppl like me with a full fledged desktop at home, I'll rather buy a cheap chromebook than an expensive windows laptop.

Depending on the chromebook model that you buy, battery life is comparable to haswell ultrabook.

And I won't say that the chromebook performance is crap, if you compare a chromebook and a laptop that costs the same, the chromebook will definitely be more responsive. That's cost the ChromeOS requires less processing power compared to Windows.

 

[Mobbyland]

There are notebooks which cost about the same price as a chromebook, but does much more being running full version of windows. Asus T-100 is a good example.

I am a heavy user, doing software engineering, running multiple VMs, MS office, RDC, games concurrently. So I am not bought into the idea of having a chromebook that need to be always online to do anything, and let Google watch me brushes my teeth everyday.

 

[Rock-kun]

A Chromebook is only useful once you:

1. Replace the crappy 16GB M.2 SSD with a 128GB SSD
2. Remove ChromeOS and install a Linux distribution on it

IOW, it's ****.

And you can't even install Windows on a Chromebook because it doesn't use BIOS or UEFI. It uses a free firmware called Coreboot (which has no GUI at all) which Windows does not support. And the SeaBIOS payload that runs on top of Coreboot (which can only be enabled after running newer x86 Chromebooks in Dev Mode) which is the key to installing another operating system, is known to not support newer versions of Windows because of Windows' strict ACPI demands.

So you are paying a premium for a crappy machine to run Linux. For that price and effort I rather buy a Windows notebook and dual boot Linux on it. At least it has a proper vendor-supported UEFI implementation and not some crappy free firmware written by a bunch of hackers who have no accountability to anybody.