In December 2010, I got a surprise, an early Christmas gift from Google: The company sent me a Cr-48, the first-model Chromebook, which I reviewed at the time. From that point on, I used it nearly every day, mostly for web browsing and writing assignments.
I retired it late last year, but didn’t replace it with a newer Chromebook. Instead, I now use a lighter and smaller notebook for my mobile computing work, the ASUS X205, which runs Windows 8.1. This change in platforms wasn’t because I no longer liked Chromebooks or the operating system they run, Chrome OS.
I bought the X205 on Black Friday to review it. Otherwise, I probably would have gotten a new Chromebook.
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Here are my reflections after using a Chromebook for almost four years:
1. Chromebooks spoiled me with their battery life, lightness and power. When I first received it, the Cr-48 would easily run for at least eight hours on a full charge. At the time, being able to use a notebook for nearly an entire workday at a location away from home or the office, without needing to find an outlet to recharge it, was a revelatory experience of convenience.
The Cr-48 was not the lightest notebook at the time when Google was giving it away: The MacBook Air was released in early 2008, and netbooks had been first sold about three years before. But, even weighing in at nearly 4 pounds, the Cr-48 was much lighter than the clunky notebooks I had previously lugged around. It set me on the path for preferring light notebooks that can run for several hours on their battery, yet are powerful enough for most computing tasks. (The first Ultrabooks — a form factor established by Intel to help OEMs make lightweight notebooks with long battery runtimes and powerful specs — wouldn’t arrive until late 2011.)
2) Chromebooks made me love SSDs. The Cr-48 was my first experience regularly using a notebook with an SSD as its main onboard storage. I became so accustomed to Chrome OS booting up in seconds, and the overall speediness that a SSD provides an OS, that I abhor now having to use a desktop or notebook with a spinning hard drive. Soon after I got the Cr-48, I upgraded an old Windows 7 notebook I had by replacing its hard drive with a cheap 30GB SSD, and saw an immediate improvement to that aging device’s performance.
3) Chromebooks conditioned me to work with small amounts of storage space. The SSD of the Cr-48 was only 16GB, but I never came close to using up this space. This was partly because you don’t install programs onto Chrome OS — it’s designed to be used with web apps, and also Google nudges you toward its cloud service, Google Drive, to store your documents and media. Otherwise, as much as possible, I avoided saving stuff on the SSD. I got into the habit of using USB flash drives to provide offline storage with my Chromebook. Today on the X205, I keep only a few files and programs installed on its 32GB SSD, and continue to use USB flash drives for most of my personal storage.
4) Chromebooks locked me into the Chrome browser. Even though I retired my Cr-48, my default browser on the X205 is Chrome. Since Chrome OS works almost identically to Chrome, Google’s browser makes this lightweight and small Windows 8.1 notebook feel not too dissimilar to me from a Chromebook. In fact, Chrome has a setting (“Windows 8 mode”) that makes its UI look and work even more like Chrome OS’s.
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5) Chromebooks killed my need for offline office programs. Since Chromebooks (and Chrome OS) cannot run Windows or Linux applications, I became more reliant on Google’s office web apps (primarily, Google Docs and Sheets). I was already using Google Docs before I got the Cr-48, but thanks to having been forced to use only it as my word processor on that Chromebook, I have felt no pressing need to install or use offline office applications on the X205. (Microsoft should rest assured that I do use their Office Online, too, on this notebook.)
6) Chromebooks made me appreciate the idea of a simplified desktop/notebook OS. Chrome OS is pretty much the Chrome browser running atop a barebones configuration of Linux. So its UI is similar to the browser’s, but with a taskbar along the bottom of the screen. Instead of feeling limiting, I came to like a desktop/notebook OS that has basic functionality under a simple UI. This is something I wish Microsoft would consider more with Windows 10. Instead, their current focus appears to be fine-tuning what the company began in Windows 8: Kludging together a touch UI with the traditional keyboard-and-mouse/touchpad one, rather than figuring ways to simplify things to make the whole user experience easier to interact with altogether.
7) Yet Chromebooks never felt like my “main” PC. Despite using a Chromebook almost every day for four years, I could not shake the feeling that it was my “spare” notebook, while I had a “main” at home (which ran Windows 7 and, later, Windows 8). In my line of work, admittedly, having multiple computer devices is beneficial and can be a requirement.
Looking back, I think the sticking point was my own reluctance to quit using Windows applications that I liked — certain bittorrent clients, image editors, media players, and video editing software, as specific examples — over seeking out and learning to use web app equivalents. Still, although I may not be using a Chromebook anymore (at least for now), I treat my current Windows 8.1 notebook almost as if it’s one.
Wen is a freelance writer. He can be reached at howardwen@gmail.com.
