ChromeBook Air

My last week of very intense business development and travel (Atlanta / Vancouver / Salt Lake City) started with a crash - I found my ThinkPad laptop completely dead on Monday morning. What a great start of the week full of presentations and travel. After realizing the laptop was really dead and due to my travel plans any warranty replacement would not work, I decided to buy a temporary replacement. A Chromebook was the simplest idea. After all we run the company on Google Apps for Business, so everything is cloud - based. I did a quick research, picked a favorite model just to find Amazon would not ship it to Vancouver, Canada (my next overnight stop) and Amazon.CA was out of stock.

So I went off to Best Buy looking for alternatives. They had two models (Acer and HP) but they looked really bad. Cheap plastic, thick body, poor screens. $300 price tag does not seem high, but I had a feeling of throwing money down the sink. When a $900 (Canadian) MacBook Air drew my attention. I never liked MacBooks, considering them overhyped and overpriced. I especially do not like the MacOS with its suite of "productivity" applications. The reason is when I look at people using the "productivity" Macs, they are really not that productive. They fight with the software both on their computers and iPhones. Google Apps in Chrome and Android on a phone can run circles around them. I am a doer. Getting things done is always my priority. MacOS has always looked too fancy and too slow to me.

But hey, a MacBook can run Google Chrome, right? So when I throw away all the Mac software, I will end up with a ChromeBook. A ChromeBook Air, to be precise! I picked the low end model for this experiment (the idea of ChromeBook is to have only little storage and an economy CPU). The Air comes with a dual core i5 (1.4GHz) and 128 GB Flash (same as the microSD card in my phone!). It is a nice piece of hardware. Thin, elegant, with a nicely build power supply (the power brick is yet another risk of buying a low end ChromeBook - you may find yourself with a 3-prong power cord that weighs more than the laptop itself).

I got up and running in less than 5 minutes. Unpacked the Air. Installed Chrome. Logged on to my company account. The Cloud is amazing in that respect. I got mail, documents, calendar, mind maps, everything as I left off on Sunday evening before the crash. In no time at all. Chrome works on the Air beautifully. After logging in it automatically installed all the extensions I was using on the crashed machine: Google Docs, Send-To-Kindle, Google Cast, Calendar, WebEx, SSH, Keep, Feedly.

And then I realized the additional power of having a computer with a local OS: I could install native apps, namely Skype, Arduino IDE, and Google Drive. You need the Drive client when traveling - it maintains a synchronized local cache of all Google Drive documents and files. So does offline Gmail. Both are essential when you spend half of your life airborne. Yes there is Internet on most planes today, but it is still expensive and slow, so having a local copy helps. Also manipulating email attachments is easier when you have a local file system and a couple of viewers.

I'd say the Air with Chrome and Google Apps is the recommended backup and/or travel machine for those who may need the former or the latter. It adds minimal weight to the travel luggage and allows to stay fast and productive (iPads or other tablets, even with add-on keyboards are neither, while approaching the price of the Air). It looks like it will continue to be my travel companion even when my ThinkPad gets fixed. The only two things I'd change are the display port (it should be a standard HDMI) and the display (the resolution is soo yesterday... it should be "retina" - level... if phones can do it, laptops should!).