Video Games Tutorials and News - I Was Forced To Buy A Chromebook
Intro
My son needs a Chromebook for school, so if we're doing this, I guess it's up to me to find the best bang for the buck Chromebook. But wait, this is going to be a lot harder than I thought. Why can't they just be good like our sponsor, cable mod, makes cables to last and their new keyboard cables are the easiest way to spice up your desk with a ton of colors now available on Amazon.
Chromebook penetration
If you or a loved one isn't currently in grade school, I wouldn't expect you to be aware of just how dominant Chromebooks have become in that space. In 2019, there were 30 million Chromebooks deployed in schools, primarily in the US and Canada, and in January 2020. Google announced that number had ballooned 33 percent to a whopping 40 million Chromebooks in classrooms around the globe.
And that was before the COVID tech explosion. Now my son is going to be joining the ranks of Chromebook users whether I like it or not, but then maybe that's not so bad.
Are chromebooks bad?
Like many of you. I've been guilty of dismissing Chromebooks' glorified web browsing appliances because Well, that's what Google intended them to be, but in the past few years they have become far more capable, with Google adding the ability to run Android apps in 2016, introducing the Linux beta on all new devices released since 2020 for your developer types out there, and even allowing enterprise users to run Windows through parallels.
Allowing Okay, yeah, the whole point of the school's Chromebook requirement is that the kids' machines will be running Chrome OS, and the two main selling points of Chrome OS are how easy it is to play a locked down fleet in them, which keeps the kids from doing anything too fun, and how lightweight they are, which indirectly makes Chromebooks crazy cheap.
Look how cheap they are!
I mean, look at this thing, a hundred and ninety dollars. I mean, new Windows laptops with MSRPs under $200 do exist, but the ones that we've seen come from less than reputable manufacturers, and I don't think that reputation is changing anytime soon. I mean, even the options for Windows machines around the $250 dollar mark make no sense because they're basically just Chromebooks that have been saddled with the additional cost of a much heavier operating system, so it's really in this low price tier that the Chromebooks shine.
Linus goes shopping!
They are capable and cost-effective machines, but all kinds of sacrifices are being made to achieve these crazy low price points. Let's go shopping. Disclosure I'm an investor in Framework, a laptop company. They don't make Chromebooks, but I thought you should know all right. Let's see what we've got here.
This is too big for a little kid. The problem is, this one doesn't have any ports for plastic. These sucked well. This is a good price. Is that screen ever tiny, not to mention those bezels? Is this YouTube article running at 720p with the CPU at 100 percent? That's just embarrassing. Look at this tiny thing that's cute.
It's a tablet with a detachable keyboard. Cover me boys This keyboard is ever gon na be cramped for a child. Maybe a touchscreen is nice to have for Android apps, maybe some drawing It is a bit small though, okay. It's got emmc storage. That's when they essentially embed an SD card into the motherboard and then use that as your system storage.
It's not very fast compared to an SSD, and this is only 32 gigs, but it'll be more responsive than a hard drive and, with tight integration with Google Drive. I might not need that much local storage. And since we're not doing any heavy computing, it doesn't need to be that fast. But, the Best Buy demo doesn't even fit on the screen properly.
I don't think this thing's going to cut it. Maybe we should look online for some other options ).
Better luck online?
Samsung has a Chromebook. Look at that fiesta. It has an S Pen and a 4K screen. Okay, at this screen size, this is what 13 inches looks like. This kind of overkill could hurt battery life on a core i5. I don't think we've seen anything with a poor tier CPU yet, A little overkill too.
Eight gigs of RAM is nice, but. While we love to joke about Chrome being a RAM hog, and you don't have Windows sucking back a bunch of your resources, there's probably a reason that most Chromebooks only have four gigs of real SSD storage. How much is this thing, a thousand dollars? If I wanted to spend MacBook money, I would get a Macbook.
Samsung Okay, how about this one? The Lenovo Flex 5 has got a core I3 that should be adequate for watching HD articles and taking notes without being overkill. Two in one for connecting devices at school, that added flexibility could really come in handy. The screen looks pretty good too. This is checking a lot of boxes right now, and it's in stock.
Of course, we can't just buy the first thing that tickles our fancy. One says up to 12 hours of battery life, and knowing that he's my son, he'll probably forget his charger, a long-lasting battery is good. Then again, they all claim to have great battery life. I guess that's another benefit of running low-land hardware in a lightweight OS, but this display seems pretty loud.
Is this a TN panel? You know, we recommended these types of displays in the past for gamers due to their super fast response times, but the colors look bad and the viewing angles are terrible. It's not something you want to put up with on a laptop, and especially not in 2022 when IPS panels have become so affordable.
Okay, back to the Lenovo seems durable The keyboard wasn't too big or too small for me, but none of them really was, and the speakers are, well, they're speakers, but at 370 US dollars. I think this is our best deal. Let's give it some weight. Shopper Linus, You aren't ready to make a decision yet, yet you forgot to get hydrated, Lttstore, Com, and you forgot another big thing long-term, support.
Important tech tip
Did you know that the support window of your Chrome OS device is determined by when it was released? I mean, that makes sense. A newer item is going to have more life left in it, but there is a big gotcha in there because devices made in 2018 are going to get automatic update support until 2022.
That's a period of four years. Meanwhile, a device released in 2020 is going to be supported until 2028. This is because in 2020. Google promised that all new Chromebooks would receive eight years of automatic update support, but they didn't bother to extend that eight-year guarantee to devices that were already released, even if they were only a few months old.
