I was not in the room so I have no idea what the real sales figures are for ChromeOS devices… but from all the talking heads and would-be influencers they seem to be saying that post pandemic sales of ChromeOS devices have been on the decline. At the same time the number of vendors offering traditional Android tablets is on the incline and Apple seems to be selling a metric ton of iPads.
What should Google be learning or maybe they have already? What have I learned and when will I get my next iPad?
Back in the day I received an Apple iPad Mini as a reward from my employer. It was a nice device but other than reading the ocassional book, listening to music while not draining my cellphone battery, or playing candy crush… it was useless. Once my kids got the hang of it they took over. (and we’ve side loaded their tech with a Chromebook for school, which they no longer use, and a kindle which they only use when they run out or battery or are being disciplined.)
Now my wife and kids are full-on Apple adopters. Granted our Macbooks are close to EOL they have the watches, iPad Air, and iPhones. As for me I am full-on Android. This is essentially because the Apple tax is pretty high and “they” just want thingns done their way. I have yet to figure out the family security thing on Android but I do not have to.
new learnings
I really like my Chromebook experience and work platform, however, since work requires a private VPN I do not want 100% of my network trafffic going through the corporate network… it’s all the unintentional traffic I worry about. Also, ChromeOS’ VPN support is pretty meager in that it lacks support for split DNS routing.
On the otherhand moving my desktop to Linux made the DNS split routing go away. I was also able to get that to work on OpenBSD except that there are other compatibility issues that I did not want to address with every product feature even though that sort of cross platform has it’s own benefits.
ChromeOS currently supports Android 9 in the stable branch. One of the killer apps I want is not supported until Android 10 or 11. (more later)
Moving my desktop to Pop_OS Linux had a very undesireable side effect in that I’m having memory errors while trying to run the Chrome browser in a flatpak. And frankly even though I have two identical machines so that I should be able to move from one machine to another in the case of failure… the cost of syncing is just too high.
The reason that ChromeOS is a good option is because the OS is a rock solid installation and same for the browser. The browser has apps and cloud services that make the machine the easiest thing to replace. Worst case in a failure you lose some local files but that should never be a real problem.
Depending what Google is trying to accomplish…
Or re-double your effort into Android and then nextgen non-Linux Android for the same reason. All I need is a reliable browser and terminal sesssion into my servers. I also need one or two native apps for video and photo editing.