The biggest consideration was price. When all was said and done, even the cheapest Mac laptop was going to set me back about $1,300 after taxes and AppleCare. And the siren song of a computer under $200 was calling my name. I got the Acer Chromebook with 2GB of RAM and a 16GB drive. It cost a shockingly low $173.
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I rarely have to edit video and my photo manipulation needs are minimal. So when I walk down to the coffee shop to work, what the hell do I need doing that can’t be done on a Chromebook? Nothing, is the answer. Precisely nothing. And if you’re being totally honest with yourself you should probably ask the same question.
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But for those people who can’t see much practical difference between the last three iterations of their iPhone, the idea of a high-end laptop like the MacBook is becoming silly.
Point #1 is kind of valid. The MacBook Air is actually $899 with a dual-core i5 processor clocked at 1.6Ghz along with 4 gigabytes of ram, 128GB SSD and Intel Graphics. The $179 ChromeBook has an Intel Celeron with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage not to mention it’s made of plastic and I can’t tell if the keyboard is full size or not. It’s also considerably thicker.
Most importantly, it runs a Google Operating System, the company that no one should trust with their personal data as opposed to Mac OS X which is built in UNIX, very secure and has millions of native applications.
Author says nothing they need to do is impossible on a ChromeBook. I guess they don’t do anything outside of a web-browser.
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I can’t imagine ever not using a Macintosh. Here are some things I do that I don’t think are possible on anything but a Windows or Macintosh machine w/ a processor that supports Virtualization, has SSD, dedicated graphics and at least 12 gigabytes of RAM.
- Windows 10 within Parallels running 24/7 (ArGIS, CAD, Tableau)
- Lightroom CC storing thousands of Canon RAW Images and used forediting
- Final Cut Pro editing 4K 30FPS video files
- Microsoft Outlook w/ a hundred emails a day, appointments, access to our exchange Global Address List and shared calendars
- Slack running full time as a dedicated app
- Drag-and-Drop of anything to anywhere
- Full-Time RSS refresh via my hosted Fever Installation
- iMessage
- iCal w/ CalDAV refresh on my server
- Microsoft Lync
- Skype for Business
- Dedicated blogging software since I don’t like writing in WordPress as I found browsers too distracting to get real work done
- A constant VPN connection for work & my server
- Backups to my Synology NAS At home
- access to WebDav, SMB and AFS networked disks at home and at work
- FTP Tool w/ shared bookmarks and Bonjour access
- A file-system w/ meta-data search that’s not being indexed by anyone outside of my network
- A media library with 4 terabytes of content all in iTunes with playlists and accessible from anywhere via my Synology
- A 400 gigabyte Photos for Mac Library
- 5K resolution at home, 4K at work via an external Thunderbolt monitor
Most importantly, not needing to be connected to the Internet to get work done. Try editing your photos or writing when Offline. You might get by for a few minutes but the ChromeBook needs Internet. I don’t always have that. Some days, I feel like I’m taking crazy-pills. Are professionals actually buying ChromeBooks and getting work done? Are they actually able to do work like I do (which some days, doesn’t feel like work because I love it so much) with a Google ChromeBook?
Or is this some justification by journalists because they’re so underpaid these days that all they can afford are NetBooks and this is a way to sort of stick it to Apple for being “too expensive”?