The real price of going ChromeOS all the way

Chromebooks to this school, chromebooks for that school...

It is being repeated over and over again, reviews are being written almost every week about a new chromebook (which is by the way exactly the same as the one from previous week, including chips, size, weight, battery life, keyboard, performance and so on), tons of user testimonials and praises are being liked and re-shared ... it is getting a bit old, isn't it?

Chromebooks are here to stay and with the new strategy to teach kids on them they are more than probable to remain part of the picture if not dominant.

However one important question is rarely if ever asked: what is the real price of using chromeOS as a replacement device (not as primary one, and not as a complimentary one, but as a sole keyboard equipped device)?

In the plethora of available devices like phones, tablets, TVs and now watches, one almost feel like there is no real need to have a PC or a tablet. Most people either already have one and use it in the rare cases where one of their other devices cannot do the job or buy new one(s) for one single reason: work!

But let's define how a laptop or a PC is used for work! If one's company is already embracing the cloud chances are they already use one or several services and pretty much all the office work can be done from a browser, thus chromeOS is capable of handling this. However there are several large classes or work related tasks that cannot be done without a specialized software: CAD/CAM, 3D production, Electrical and other type of engineering, and... software development. 

The last is possibly the most common use case. For years now companies are trying to create businesses that offer an online solution for those kind of work related tasks, but the adoption is slow and currently - very low. The concerns are numerous and come from different sides: security, speed, availability, reliability, management etc. The reality is that while those services are well intentioned and legit business ideas, the execution is often subpar and even if it is at good level with the user target the cost if overwhelmingly steeper compared to the cost of ownership. 

So how do things really stack together for a regular Joe developer for web? I will present a simple example - one that is of course based on experience (mine and those of friends of mine who have switched) and is by no means presentable as evidence, but I think it comes close to at least people in similar situation. 

So, Joe is working as a freelance developer, web stuff, JavaScript, PHP, some HTML and CSS. However from time to time he has to deal with Java, Python and other technologies. Joe knows that there are at least two possible solutions for his needs: a MacBook or a ChromeBook. The projected lifespan of the laptop would be 5 years.

MacBook:

Price (ownership): 1299$

External ssd disk (for backups): 199$

Text editor/IDE: 70-100$

ChromeBook:

Price (ownership): 199$-399$

Storage (auto-backups included by vendor): 2 years free, 1.99/mo for 3 years = 71.64$

IDE: 19.00/mo = 1440$

At this point we have to make some very important clarifications. The online IDE in the example is Cloud9, I personally find it to be the best for my needs and I have recommended it to my peers and this is possibly the reason why they use it as well. The pricing there is 'pay as you go' so basically it could be much cheaper than that, but it is worth noting that with the MacBook you get much more RAM and processing power than what you get on Cloud9 for almost the same amount of money. Also I have included an external disk for the MacBook case as one need to backup, we all know that, some of use learned it the hard way. With cloud storage this is being taken care of for us. 

I have not included other stuff like music or movies for several reasons: it is unclear to me how the cost of ownership compares to the cost of streaming, also I am not aware if purchased once the song becomes yours forever and can you copy it over unlimited times etc. I have also not included software like budgeting tools etc because I see lots of people migrating to online tools for this and not for other reason but being able to access their data from their mobile devices like phones and tablets. I would consider those expenses to be similar in both cases.

As seen from the above example if you are working as web developer the cost at the end of the period would be higher for the ChromeBook. That's okay if we apply some basic knowledge of finances and make sure the money spent in a period of time have different present value than the same amount if spent today, so lets keep it simple and say that those are almost equal (1).

Now let's consider a different price. I call it emotional price. People tend to love their stuff: gadgets are especially lover and Apple's products are at the top of loved possession. With a chromebook you simply do not care. I used to be proud of my computer - business class, slick, thin, wonderful. But on its own it is really nothing more than a way to show of as the components inside are doing the exactly same job as any other laptop. With the chromebook I really do not care. I know no one will notice it because it looks exactly the same as any other. Samsung attempted to make the chromebook look fancy and they failed. Being liberated from this emotional dependency and more over being unburdened with its security and safety was really something very new to me. 

Of course I try to keep it clean and working, but when my partner drops it do I freak out? Nope. Because I have no attachment to it. I know I can use another one, on the cheap end, and continue where I left of. Years ago Google put accent on that with the video ads for the first chromebook. Back then I did not even understood it. Now I do!

But wait, there is even another price - ecological. We all tend to say that because those devices are very cheap they are basically disposable. But in fact we do not use them as such. We use them as regular laptops, we tend to try to not throw them at walls and drop them, slip them in the bath full of water and so on, we don't care about them but we still use them as intended. So the projected life, while maybe not 5 years, is at least good 3 to 4 years. Of course Apple says that they do recycle and their laptops are indeed one of the best when it comes to energy efficiency. But think of this in a different angle: while your laptop sleeps for at least 14 hours every 24 hours, the cloud never sleeps. Which means that while you are not doing anything on it, someone else is using that processing power for something else. Cumulatively this reduces the material needed to satisfy everyone's computing needs globally. Think about the processor: yes, macbooks are really powerful, but how often do you load it at 100%, let alone load all the cores? Does it cumulate to more than 30 minutes daily? Now consider the cloud where you IDE is a virtualized machine and one single CPU is running yours and possible many more users. Electricity? If you run your MacBook at 100% load all the time it will not last 10 hours on battery, on the other hand cloud providers are in the rush to become greener and greener in ways we as individuals could not accomplish even if we wanted: cooling from the see, energy from the sun and wind etc. 

"But all the traffic I am making using those online apps, does that not require energy". Well yes, it does, but you are doing it anyways. Besides the amount of bytes to watch a movie online and to download it and watch it locally is the same. The amount of bytes you will exchange in a month of using an online IDE is lower than the amount of bytes you will exchnage to download a source locally and upgrade your IDE. 

Choosing a ChromeBook might be on par financially with buying a latest model MacBook, but the emotional and ecological costs are much lower in the case of ChromeBook.

And yes, it is certainly not for everyone, especially as a only device. But depending on your needs it could be reasonable choice and a more responsible one as well. 

Many years ago I have written about how you could be a responsible person in global planetary context and switch to Linux to keep the baby seal alive. Today I am saying this: be a responsible person and chose the greener alternative if you can!

The confessions of a chromebook user

Here is the deal - I am sick with the Chromebook!

I know I will get flamed even after that first line, not because I have no right to be mad at those machines and not because they are perfect and I am wrong; from that first line it will be because of the new fan-boy bandwagon that has been rolling recently - the Chromebook / ChromeOS core fans.

It is understandable - after so many years in the grip of Microsoft and Windows, after so many years of Linux being the idiot child in the bunch, after so many OS disappearances (even today I have read about someone testing Solaris... what?). And then there is OSX as well, the brave saviour of us all that never was - on its latest incarnations OSX is so buggy that I often hear the once 'windows' branded joke - "it needs rocket fuel to run at normal speed" being repeated over and over again, now that 8GB of RAM is the minimum required to have installed if you want to browse the web in more than one tab or actually do some work on your computer. 

And there it is - the sunshine, the little gem that Google decided to gift to the world for unknown or at least unclear reasons: ChromeOS - a stripped down version of Linux that runs it's own graphics stack and has Chrome on top of it.

I can whine and whine for days about the issues with Linux and even more - months - for the stupidity collection labelled as OSX, but this is a post about ChromeOS.

I knew I was not going to get out of this without whining at the end, but there it was - cheap (okay okay - affordable) and promising to never bother me with updates, viruses, hardware incompatibilities etc. laptop...

What I did not expect was that even their own (Google) services will be impossibly slow to use on those machines in less than 1 year! And don't start with 'powerwash' or 'try in an incognito mode' - this is bull shit! I want to have adblock and still be able to use the damn site and I would NEVER use youtube if I have to watch an ad before each fucking video there!

Google+ is now so slow I can actually see the rerendering when new data is loaded. Spreadsheets - I can actually take a small nap when the initial load is going. Hangouts - I actually need to kill it from time to time because I consider half a gigabyte of RAM used by a chat service to be obscene!


Was this whole thing a plan to 'revive' the dying PC market? Or are we too stupid to not remember the rise and fall of the 'netbook'?

In any way ChromeOS might be gaining 10-20 points in some benchmarks now and then but those devs at google are making sure that each week the apps become more and more demanding even if they do not present new features (like for example using paper elements in drive - WTF!) - at the end of the full year of ownership you end up with an almost completely unusable device - its too slow to handle new apps, its unsellable (unless the buyer is a fanboy who does not care if the device can actually be used for something), its untweakable (at least with old windows laptops you can sell to linux nerds and they can use it but who would buy a device with 16GB or storage, its not 1999 any more - the last time I was able to sell a PC with only 4 GBs of storage).

So for 1/3 of the price you actually get 1/3 of the usable lifetime and 1/3 of the functionality of a regular laptop.

I guess one gets what one pais for.

So I have only me to blame for my stupidity. Once I had a thinkpad - latest business model, ultra portable (its funny how almost all laptops today are more portable than the then ultra portable) - I paid premium. I have made a mistake.

Now I have a chromebook - I have paid really small amount and again I made a mistake.

I guess Buddha was right - the true path is in the middle.

And if you are wondering - yes, I ave tried crouton - on paper it sounds great, have you tried it running for more than a day - all the storage is eaten by the swap created for it. ALL OF IT! It is a complete crap! Even if I leave o the background doing nothing it still eats up all the (oh so large) free space on the ssd.

Also I am sick of not being able to play AC3 sounds. I cannot chose what people send me.

If after all this you still consider buying a Chromebook as a second laptop ask yourself this: why do you need a second laptop? You get bored with the first one and you need something else to sit on your lap?

At least this is what I feel right now. Might be the chromebook, might be the pain from the oral surgery I had today. But I will definitely not buy another chromebook in the foreseeable future.

Closure tools development in the cloud

I have been waiting for this for some time now!

Probably this happened some time ago, but I found out just today that it is now possible to use cloud9 ide on a complete shared environment, which means I have a terminal, python and java runtimes and I can finally develop using complete closure tools in the cloud! I just had to copy over my setup from a local folder to the hosted environment and it just worked.

Well not "just", because they run an older version of python (2.6), but it is pretty easy to overcome this.

The finding was part of my ongoing investigation for an article on using Chomebook as a primary laptop for the modern web developer. Of course my work flow is already skewed enough by my decade and a half living with GNU/Linux, but even I find it frustrating to constantly have to "update" and "distro-upgrade". The last piece missing will probably be the hardest to figure out, but I have one last trick up my sleeve.

If it all goes well and sound I would be buying my next laptop from Google. If not, well, I would be still buying a laptop with Chrome OS but it would be the cheapest one (Samsung S3) and will use it only for light reading.

Tip: I know that the Samsung can be used for development as well, because all the compilation and checks are run on the server, however because it has only 2GB of RAM it would be hard to open many "applications" on it and I am not sure how usable it would be for devs.