> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything, in fact it's worse, since browsers are usually heavier than real apps.

If by "Save on anything" you mean saving files, you are completely wrong.

There is a filesystem that you can save any data to. If you use the Linux VM you can run nearly any typical Linux software (including any of the in vogue coding agents). You can even run llama.cpp or ollama with GPU acceleration, though you might be constrained by the laptop level GPU and Memory constraints.

There are completely offline apps and tools available (via Android, Linux, and even offline PWAs).

You can even write your own apps and run them only locally on the any of the above 3 runtimes.

Of course, I wouldn't do these on a school-specced Chromebook that costs $200, but $700 Chromebook would easily suffice.

If you mean "Save money", then that's wrong too. ChromeOS is by default more lightweight than traditional Desktop OS's because of the relative lack of legacy cruft and the managed runtime. Even the Linux distro it includes is very stripped down by default (although you can bog it down by running too much stuff like any computer)

The only thing you can't do is run Windows or Mac specific software, but if you need that, ChromeOS was never a consideration anyways.

I've used and defended ChromeOS for power-users for a while now, though I'm rather less interested in it after the last year or two, and especially with this "Googlebook" push.

The good of it is, you get a state-of-the-art browser, constantly auto-updated against any security vulnerabilities and locked down against any type of hacking or malware, with first-class support for audio, video, bluetooth, and things like that that have tended to be hit-or-miss with Desktop Linux on bare metal. Contrary to lots of tech community noise, UBlock Lite continues to work fine and is perfectly adequate for blocking ads. You can indeed save local files and use them fine.

You also get a full Linux OS with command-line and desktop apps working fine. Pretty much everything you could want to do Linux-y works. Android apps work locally too, if that's helpful to you. So it seems, or seemed, like the best of both worlds to me.

Alas, nowadays, Google seems rather less interested in it, and Googlebooks sound much more limited to me. Meanwhile, Apple also discourages, though has not blocked (yet?) installing apps outside their App Store, and wants you to keep all your data and messaging in the Apple ecosystem. Microsoft is trying to do the same regarding apps, and apparently, at least some configurations of Windows 11 will force you to log in to a OneDrive account and then upload your files to it, delete them locally (!), and try to bill you to access them if they take up more than a gig or something.

I already decided months ago anyways that my next laptop is going to be a Framework running native desktop Linux, since it's much easier to troubleshoot in the LLM era, and it seems like every other desktop OS just keeps getting worse.

My wife and my 9yo have Chromebooks. Their needs are met. I (mostly) don't have to worry about data hygiene.

I'm sure my kid will want a "real" computer at some point, but by then he will hopefully have enough maturity to keep it secure. My wife couldn't care less.

> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks. You need the exact same hardware as a real laptop, you don't get to save on anything,

In a time when buttons are too expensive, avoiding having a windows key is a valuable savings :P

I've purchased a few chromebooks over time, and probably need to get one more for my mother-in-law. For her, the limitations of ChromeOS are a feature --- it's much harder for her to screw it up when she's on a call with fake support than with windows and she hadn't run anything other than a browser on her windows computer anyway.

Certainly the core hardware is basically the same, but fluffy optional hardware tends to be left off or lower cost for Chromebooks. Many manufacturers offer laptops without an OS, but you usually miss out on pricing promotions so you're paying for Windows even if you don't want it. Chromebooks get pricing promotions and firesales, so careful shopping gets you pretty inexpensive computers that are good enough to do what they need to do.

I don't like the forced expiration, and it's especially brutal when you purchase a new device late in its model life ... but I do try to purchase models that can use 3rd party bios replacement scripts so you can use them for other stuff when the OS is too far expired. Kind of derpy to have to bios replace to run ChromeOS flex to keep doing what you were doing, but such is life. Sometimes the device doesn't live that long, and that's fine too. Some of the chrombooks are cheaper simply because they have a very tiny SSD, and few of them are user replaceable, which makes prospects for running Windows later in life pretty bleak, but Windows is pretty bleak these days anyway. :P

> I still don't get the point of Chromebooks

Use case scenario that it fills perfectly for me: I'll spend a lot of evenings on my back porch streaming local sports or Youtube.

The short math on my last refurbished Chromebook would have been cents per hour of use I got out of it.

Battery life: Granted I'm using the screen at it's lowest possible (stock) brightness in my scenario, but I get at the very least 6 hours per charge on a 17" display.

If something catastrophic were to happen to it I'm more than happy to replace a ~$100 piece of hardware that's serving one dedicated function for me, and there's 0 data of consequence that I'd be losing. And it's sustained light amounts of rain with no side effects.

Freedom == more rope for the user to strangle themselves. Most casual users don't care for that

The point is that kids can't break the OS.

Schools and boomers

For schools it can be locked down with group policies, for boomers it's just a machine to use a web browser