The more I use a Chromebook (home brew), the more I realize that I actually don’t need a new Mac. There simply are no tasks or things I need one for. And please note that this is about my own personal user case. I am no developer, graphical designer, musical artist or professional video producer. I am a simple blogger/youtuber, and I use my devices accordingly. ChromeOS1 makes the computer extremely fast, everything runs so smooth even on older hardware. That’s the huge benefit this minimalistic OS has over OSX and Windows. A Chromebook has very good performance and starts really fast too. Another benefit is the very long battery life.
“It’s not the same thing as running Chrome and Chrome apps on your Mac. I thought that too before I tried”
And no, it’s not the same thing as running Chrome and Chrome apps on your Mac. I thought that too before I tried.
My Chromebook Home brew that is based on the CloudReady installer of Chromium OS from Neverware, is running on an old Windows laptop from Fujitsu2, and it has the best performance of all the computing devices I own at the moment. It’s faster than my 11-inch Macbook Air with Intel Core i7 processor and 8GB RAM, it’s faster than my Acer Aspire V15 Windows 10 laptop with Intel Core i5 processor and 8GB RAM, it’s faster than my iPad Air 2, it’s faster than my Apple Watch and it’s faster than my iPhone 6s Plus.
All thanks to the Chrome operating system. That’s how good it is. And that’s also why it’s not the same thing as running Chrome on your normal computer. The user experience and performance is amazing with ChromeOS.
At first I thought that I at least still needed to use Final Cut Pro X on my Mac, but I don’t. I don’t do any advanced videos that actually needs such advanced features as FCPX has. I use iMovie directly on my iPhone 6s Plus instead. It’s enough for my Youtube videos. So I don’t need to edit videos on a computer anymore. And as you may remember, I didn’t for two complete years either when I was Post-PC.
And when it comes to writing, I absolutely enjoy doing that in the excellent app called StackEdit on my Chromebook. The experience is even better than using Ulysses on my Mac or iOS devices. I really like the tight integration with Google Photos that StackEdit has. It’s so easy to get to all my photos and add them to an article. The features that Ulysses has that StackEdit don’t is more for novel writers. More export options for example.
At first I was also worried that there was no TextExpander3 alternative available for ChromeOS, but I got surprised that there actually was! It’s called Auto Text Expander and works as good as TextExpander. The features it doesn’t have is nothing I use anyways. So that Chrome app works in the background for me while I’m writing in StackEdit. So now I can easily link to my blog posts, articles, search results from my own search engine, insert images from Google Photo, create footnotes, markup the text and much more thanks to Auto Text Expander.
Another thing that I needed badly to be as productive as possible was a clipboard manager. And once again I were surprised to see that there was a great one for Chrome too called Clipboard History 2. So now I can easily copy and paste stuff using the great Clipboard manager. It saves everything I copy and you can add some clips as favorites, and it automatically syncs everything I copy to all my other devices that runs Chrome! Amazing! I like it a lot.
“I can buy 4 Chromebooks for the same price as the 12-inch Macbook”
My Chromebook home brew experience has been such a pleasant surprise that I am planning to buy a real Chromebook this Fall and use it as my main computer. And to be honest with you, my 11-inch Macbook Air is collecting dust at the moment, and I can’t see a reason why I would buy the 12-inch Macbook anymore. I mean, I can buy 4 Chromebooks in the lower end for the same price as the 12-inch Macbook. Or I can buy 2-3 high end Chromebooks for the same price. Depending on which configurations. The same thing with the very expensive 12.9-inch iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard.
And the build quality and design is not so much better on the Macbooks anymore. Look at the new high end Chromebook from HP for example. The HP Chromebook 13 has a droolworthy build quality and design. And it has two USB-C ports :)
And I am sure that most Mac users could use a Chromebook instead, if they know what I know and just give it a try.