Google’s Chromebook should be right up my alley. I was an early adopter of Google Docs/Drive, and 95 per cent of everything I do on computers is through a browser. But at a $249 price point, there’s no real point to buying one, because I can get a comparable machine for just a few dollars more, one that will let me do that extra five per cent, like editing audio, and with a pretty decent 15-inch screen instead of the netbook-ish 12-inch display.
My Asus Eee PC, purchased for $300 a couple years ago, has served me well, but as I get a little older and my eyesight gets a little worse, a bigger screen has become a higher priority. And it’s not just an aesthetic thing: at work, my world changed for the better when I was given a two-monitor display. With a laptop at home, I can’t get the same effect, but I’m much more productive on my wife’s laptop, with its 15-inch screen, than I am on my netbook. That’s mainly because I have to keep hitting F11 to get into and out of full-screen mode in my computer’s browser, and if I don’t go full-screen the browser window is so small I’ll inevitably have to scroll to an annoying level.
So, screen size matters! But what matters more is that five per cent of stuff I do that I couldn’t do on a Chromebook. Now that Aviary’s Myna application is gone, there is no online audio editor robust enough to approximate Audacity, let alone GarageBand, both of which I use to produce podcasts and songs. Just as important, I use spreadsheets fairly extensively, and while I put them on Google Drive for storage and can refer to them there, when I want to actually work with them, it’s much easier to manipulate them offline in either Excel (work) or LibreOffice (home).
In the end, I could buy a Chromebook and make use of it, but I’d have to keep my netbook and super-old iBook around in order to do what it couldn’t do. So what would it take for me to commit to one? Start with a 15-inch screen. Right now, the $249 price is essentially the same as every relevant netbook and budget laptop, considering that the savings come from 16GB of hard drive space versus, say 320GB (Literally, I bought a 16GB flash drive for $11 the other day — it’s a negligible amount of storage), so the Chromebook has to match up with competing laptops in other features. After all, the main selling point, one that benefits Google, is to point out that your laptop does not need 500GB of hard drive space, because you can easily store all your stuff in the cloud, and stuff that ought not be online can be stored on a separate drive.
But the second thing Google could do to make me switch is to invest, themselves, in Chrome extensions or other online applications that replace a wider and wider variety of tasks, covering more and more niches. Google Docs covers the office suite stuff, image editing is well covered by SumoPaint, Pixlr, and others, and I’m told YouTube actually has fairly robust video editing capability, but audio editing is a dead zone, and I’m sure there are other tasks in other fields that don’t have acceptable online alternatives.
It’s too bad, because I’m a huge proponent of light computing, someone the Chromebook is designed to serve perfectly, but a few seemingly minor issues add up to keep me away from it.
(Image cc-licensed: "Chromebooks Rollout - Shenkus" by kjarrett)
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