Rich vs. thin client is a pendulum that seems to swing about every 10-20 years.

In the mid-'70s, a computer was a big box by IBM or DEC with a number of thin terminals attached. These had enough power to display a screenful of interactive information without having to talk to the server constantly (sort of like an early version of HTML forms).

Then PCs happened, and suddenly you could have your very own device with a slice of the power of that DEC. The client was suddenly so rich but widely available connectivity so slow -- 300-1200 bps modems -- that most people never connected to a server (except for special national networks like France's Minitel).

By the mid-'90s, thin was in again. Sun and Oracle defined a "Network Computer" spec. Apple was planning to build devices for it, but then Jobs had better ideas and the NC never really took off.

So we got ever richer clients in even more personal form factors. The iPhone became the ultimate rich client: in the App Store model, each online service provider is expected to build a native binary and deliver it through Apple. Microsoft has been plotting along similar lines with the Universal Windows platform.

At the same time Google has been trying to push the pendulum back to the thin end. With the new "Instant Apps" model [1], even Android is being turned into a web-like platform of app fragments delivered on the fly. Will be interesting to see how far they can take this -- will the Android runtime be part of Chrome eventually?

[1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2016/05/android-insta...

I think it's a hill that a lot of people and companies have been pushing computing tech up for many years...now we've reached the top, and we're rolling down the other side. Getting to the top required getting mobile networks "fast enough", systems small enough (because what's the point of being mobile if your system is big and heavy...might as well leave it plugged in at home or at the office), and the web (or something like it) advanced enough to be the platform on which these network apps are built.

If it were a pendulum, we'd see it swing back in 10-20 years. I can't think of any scenario in which that'll happen, even as small/personal devices get more powerful.

Note: I don't know if our destination is a good one. But, momentum and gravity (and hundred billion dollar companies) are definitely pushing us in a pretty clear direction.

Transport signals have gone from 2.5G to 10G to 40G to 100G to 200G per wave, and from 8 waves to 16 waves to 40 waves to 96 waves to 100+ waves per fiber.

The bottleneck has existed for a decade at least, and is invested in to keep pushing it out at the same time all this other stuff is happening.

Effectively Chromebooks are the new "EEE PC"/netbook which were also very popular with children and teens as they were chip as dirt which meant that they were often bought as a gift or when a child needed a 2nd computer to take with them.

So when you have devices that cost 199 it's not that surprising that they outsell devices that cost 899 and upwards.

If the "premium" chromebooks outsold MBP's/MB's it would be as much as a surprise to me as why would anyone want to put a Core i7/i5 CPU and upto 16GB's of RAM in a chromebook in the first place.

HN users don't see Chromebooks because HN users are a very special subset - highly educated and well paid which works in development and IT at large.

If you look at children and low wage blue collar workers you'll see many more of them those are the people that buy what one would not even consider a budget laptop but an entry one.

Those are also the people for whom Google and Facebook are defacto the internet, I've recently met people that didn't knew "Office" even existed outside of Google Docs.

If you are high school student that only wants to get access to Facebook and maybe be able to write a small paper you don't need more than a Chromebook. If you are a truck driver or a security guard that wants to be able to read email or watch YouTube you don't need more than a Chromebook. And for those people a 150-250$ device makes all the sense in the world.

College students would probably still be able to use a Chromebook for 99% of their tasks, but since Apple has a student discount it's chic Apple most likely will still continue to rule the College class.

I mean really, 99% of the time all you need is a web browser and a connection to remote into the machine that's doing the real lifting for you.

My favourite part is the disposability. If it gets trashed or stolen, all I have to do is sign in to a new chromebook and generate new keys to be back up and running.

The major difference between a Ubuntu and a ChromeOS install is that one of them has a lot of marketing, the other doesn’t.

That’s the largest difference.

Here in New Hampshire I've seen many, especially among older people who are way too overwhelmed by PCs and Macs. Things like viruses, installing programs, updating the OS, "my hard drive is full? How do I fix that?", etc, there's just so much they have to learn that technical people and younger people take for granted as simple. The Chromebook reduces the bar to maintaining your own machine among low-digital-literacy people.

Many just want a "laptop" to get and send email, look at their grandkids on Facebook, complain on the local facebook page group about xyz, look up weather and news, and buy things online.

This group also does not understand why some laptops are $600 and others are $1,400 and yet they appear to run the same programs and visually look the same. I don't blame them. A few of my friends have said, "My mom/dad (aged 40-60) needed a new computer and I convinced them to get a Chromebook, now I don't have to answer all their technical questions anymore."

They are fantastic machines for the technically less-literate and frugal-minded.

That may be because of who is buying them. They are making huge inroads to public schools (a former apple stronghold). The "Cloud Everything" bit solves a large "where's my data" problem that used to plague our kids WRT school work. No more taking the wrong thumbdrive to school problem.

Technology is very important to learning but there are so many useful and inexpensive ways to do this but this requires those in charge to look past the marketing power some companies wield

Well, this assumes one particular type of development! I would not choose a Chromebook to develop, say, Chrome!

I tried Crouton a few years ago, wanting to run xbmc. Audio didn't work, because it required a newer version of the Linux kernel. It turns out you can't just install a stock Linux kernel: you have to use a patched device-specific kernel that Google provides, and for my device, the Google-provided kernel was too old. Perhaps I could have built some frankenkernel, but instead I gave up and got a real Linux box.

I would not try to use Crouton again for a general Linux box, because you become dependent on Google for updating core software.

My "special needs" was running popular and well known Linux software. Many people in this thread have said that running Crouton on a Chromebook is just like having Ubuntu or Debian. But this is not so:

1. Google does not reliably update core software

2. It's harder to get help when things go wrong, because the system is sufficiently different from an ordinary Linux box

For those reasons, if you want to run Linux software, it's better to use a familiar Linux distribution, and not ChromeOS.

Only because upstreaming is so slow. Those patches end up on the relevant mailing lists and eventually get merged.

I have a cheap 11" Acer C720 and I probably use it more than my Macbook Pro. I have command line only Ubuntu installed, and the result is a tab I can open to have a full linux shell, much like how you would use a macbook. For all intents and purposes, it's the same OS, but it's not.

A few things I particularly like are battery like (maybe 8 hours?), no fans, matte screen, and macbook like keyboard and trackpad. Also Chrome OS maps the F1/F2 keys to forward/backward keys in Chrome, which I use all the time surprisingly.

All in all, I would highly recommend a Chromebook. For development it's great. If you don't want to use Crouton, a linode server you can SSH into is just as good as a macbook really. Now that they will be able to run all Android apps, it's even more tempting.

I'm amused by this explanation, because I grew up doing chroot before virtualization took off and obviously before Docker.

Feeling old.

I think you must be mistaken on this. I own a C720, and there is a fan in it.

You can see it in the upper left of this picture:

https://www.chromium.org/_/rsrc/1381990807648/chromium-os/de...

In practice, this means that if I hit a three key chord, then I flip over to a regular xfce, and if I hit another three key chord I go back to ChromeOS.

I do all web-browsing in ChromeOS. I do all programming and textediting in xfce. Or rather in vim, using my standard vim setup. [I'm a mathematician, so I do somewhat minor programming and lots and lots of LaTeX writing].

I tried using a Class 10 MicroSD card to hold an Ember-CLI project, and running commands on it was intolerably slow.

I take it as a given that my Chromebook will always be more secure than my Macs and Windows machines. Less likely to have invasive malware of all types.

I currently have a Toshiba Chromebook with a gorgeous screen and good battery life. It just works.

For instance, is a physical keyboard even necessary? Do you use FB? Apple, or Android phone? Contracts, or prepaid? Do you buy stuff from small websites? Or, is it just not worth the security risk? Does it bother you if a website demands a profile picture? Does the repairability of a electronic device matter? I'd appreciate any feedback.

I'm just curious. I'm not one of these rich guys trying to corner the next big trend. I'm pretty poor, but interested in tech., and would like to get a gauge on where it might be heading.

And he's not a first time user of computers either. He grew up with an Atari 400 (yup, he was a teenager during the Golden Age of home computers).

[1] That is, he makes all his income from his writing. https://seanhoade.wordpress.com/

Edit: added a bit of history. And a link in case anyone is interested in his books.

It's actually really easy to believe and frankly not particularly interesting. The cost of a chromebook is like 1/3 or something of that of a mac. I'd sure hope that unit volume was higher..

Other tasks have completely made the transition for many people. Listening to music; everybody under 30 streams it, and looks at me funny when I talk about "owning" an album. Email and messaging; no such thing as local email clients anymore, except for us stubborn old-timers, or people who have to use Outlook for work. Nobody I know, other than nerds with their own websites and servers, has an email address that isn't @gmail.com (a few @hotmail.com and maybe one or two Yahoos). I work on mail admin tools, and a webmail client and still use GMail exclusively for my personal mail. Photos are on their way off the local machine, but I think it's about 50/50 among my friends, as to whether they keep local copies or not.

Anyway, I've already said how I think it's different. It sounds like you disagree with me, though I'm not sure what the basis of your disagreement is; it seems to be that a regular laptop can do everything online like a Chromebook. Which I haven't said anything about; I'm speaking of who I think will be immediately comfortable with the Chromebook way of doing things, and I think it's people who've not been trained to think of a computer as a permanent storage device.

Personal anecdote - I like updating my resume at least once a year. A few years back I struggled to find the latest local copy of my Word resume. Frustrated, I found one that was a few years old, updated it with details for the intermediate years and proceeded to import it into Google docs. Now I don't have to look too hard to find it.

Depends on what you keep locally on the machine =) I've generally got a bunch of DVD rips, a few dozen games, my dev environments, documentation for whatever I'm working on (API references and such), a bunch of ebooks...

My important data is on my local machine, and my irreplaceable data is backed up to the cloud. It's a very different paradigm of computing, compared to the people whose laptops are "crippled" without Internet.

>> A keyboard opens up the door to really building and creating, USB ports allow expansion

>> and Chrome OS is hackable in ways tablets are not.

And a PC or Mac laptop is all of things, and so much more.