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> I have a hard time seeing how any Chromebook above $ 349,- could still survive in an post-MacBook Neo age.

I doubt there's enough of a market for the use case alone, but nice Chromebooks are perfect for travelling internationally - you can reset them before border crossings and quickly restore them after passing through border crossings where anybody is liable to ask for access to your devices.

by Topfi12 hours ago|

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Never thought of it, but conceptually, I could see the appeal for very privacy minded folks and those with heightened security requirements. Course, it's a question of thread profile whether one trusts Google and case dependent whether one can actually expect free and unrestricted access to a VPN for set up once they are in the country in question. Plus, you could just do this with any OS or laptop really, just use Tails or some other live distro. In any case, as you said, likely a small target market.

by Marsymars12 hours ago|

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The trust venn diagrams I think aren't quite as bad as you describe - there are a ton of people with gmail accounts who implicitly start from a position of trust with Google, but I'd wager a lot of them wouldn't trust "border guard from a random country" to have unrestricted access to their personal gmail. They don't really need to care about VPNs either once across the border, https access to gmail.com is all they need.

by ac2917 hours ago|

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> ChromeOS meanwhile has the worst compatibility off all four

ChromeOS can run desktop Linux software and Android software, so it definitely isnt worse than Mac. Its probably even better than Windows. Of course, if you need Mac/Windows software, Web/Android/Linux alternatives might not exist or might be worse. But the devices are hardly lacking software compatibility.

by Topfi17 hours ago|

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No, ChromeOS cannot. You can only run Linux applications via Crostini. Heavily sandboxed and restricted to limited hardware access, that is not software compatible by any reasonable measure. If that counts, my MacBook is compatible with all software ever made via UTM. Also, lest we forget ISA. If these Googlebooks are arm64, that restricts software compatibility further still as Crostini doesn't translate between arm64 and x86_64, so we are going from poor, limited support, to worse.

For reference:

> Cameras aren't yet supported.

> Android devices are supported over USB, but other devices aren't yet supported.

> Android Emulators aren't yet supported.

> Hardware acceleration isn't yet supported, including GPU and video decode.

> ChromeVox is supported for the default Terminal app, but not yet for other Linux apps.

Source: https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en