“Do it,” A voice in my mind had coaxed me, “Buy the Google laptop. Everyone knows you’re a little Google zombie anyway.”
It was my freshman year of college, and my HP had seen better days. I needed a new computer- fast, cheap, and easy to carry around. Besides, I loved the Chrome browser, and I used Google’s apps for everything on my phone. Hey, some people are Apple fanboys, and others are strictly PC. I wanted to try something new.
Most of you probably know about Chromebooks by now- they’ve gotten a bad reputation as being glorified tablets with plastic keyboards, and only serving any kind of use as long as they were on the internet. After all, it’s a machine that runs Google Chrome- and that’s about it, right? Apart from a few apps, it’s a dead weight if you can’t find a good wifi signal.
But Google has been expanding their line of tricks to include offline functionality. By syncing your Chromebook locally, you can access your work from offline and make edits. And by being able to start up and go in a matter of mere seconds, Chromebooks are ideal for work, school, and for writers who like to type their ideas spur-of-the-moment. The batteries last for about half a day on full charge, even after years of use, so they’re perfect for using as electronic notebooks that you can take to class (and browse Tumblr on, if you’re bored and sitting in the back row).
Even better news, is that you don’t even have to buy a new model to enjoy the offline functions, because when Google updates their Chromebooks, every laptop gets the makeover. So even my 2-year-old model is able to enjoy the newer features, and I can count on it to still keep up with each newer generation.
Of course, the device doesn’t have a lot of storage space- but everything is just saved onto a cloud. Google Drive is a slick way to move files and folders to other computers, and even your phone, without sticking anything into a USB slot. With most of your important documents on Drive, you can literally access the contents of your Chromebook from anywhere just by logging into your account.
Microsoft, which is the last company you’d expect to feel intimidated by a browser-only computer, has become so paranoid that I can’t help but laugh at their feeble attempts at slander. Their PSA-like campaign, Don’t Get Scroogled, warns the public that Chromebooks can’t use Microsoft Word, and presses that Chromebooks are still useless without an internet connection. As if using anything but MS Word is something that no sane person would ever want to consider doing, right?
I tell people all the time that if they have work that they need to do on the go, and are tired of Microsoft but too cheap for Apple, that Chromebooks are a pretty good option to consider. But the way I talk about them, people have accused me of being kind of a Google zombie.
That’s usually when I bite them, spread the GVirus into their flesh, and drag my corpse-limbs away.