I wanted to be an early adopter of the ChromeOS echosystem when the early CX devices were available. Unfortunately, they were rare, expensive and slow. Finally in 2011 I purchased my first ChromeBox because I knew that I wanted some sort of computer for my kids but I did not want to spend my time maintaining them. I was already upgrading my inlaw’s computer and that was taking an unreasonable amount of time. I was also care and feeding my personal and work computers… even though I wasboth a mac and PC there was just too much to do.

When ChromeOS went mainstream and premium machines were available I dove head first. Now I spend my time making and doing instead of fixing. My boss can spend months moving her work machine from one laptop to another… I can switch between machines in minutes. In fact I had a failed 1TB M.2 drive and when I replaced it I was back in business in less than 10 minutes including the time to recover the OS.

Here’s the interesting bit. My two premium ChromeOS devices are both 16GB ram, 64GB SSD, i7 both are Google Pixel. But even with the i7 chip they are showing their age as they are only dual core. My ASUS ChromeBox CN62 is a premium device and it too is an i7 dual core.

My kids are growing up and during Covid have been hybrid learning. I bought them Lenovo “student” laptops and things are going well. There was one instance when I thought one of their laptops failed so I purchased a slightly bigger Lenovo but no touch or 2-in-1/360-deg monitor. It’s the same mediatec CPU and so it’s functional enough for classroom zoom or google meet but it’s just a little too slow for my work needs as the 4 cores are pegged when I have one or two tabs and a terminal session… The RAM is supposed to be compressed but 4GB is just not enough.

Another sideeffect is that I like the Thinkpad keyboard that I have been getting used to all over again. So switching to the laptop has had some productivity loss and driving 2-3 extra displays is going to draw even more CPU/resources.

The next upgrade is going to be a tough call.