By switching to Chromebooks and using Google applications suite (aka G Suite), a northern England council, responsible for various services in the county, managed to save lots of money and lives – mentioned Google recently.
Not only did the council saved money by buying Chromebooks – which tend to be cheaper than their desktop/laptop counterparts, but also they saved money on licenses for various applications by using G Suite (Docs, Gmail, Hangouts, etc).
And if money is not a good enough justification for a switch, how about a reference made by the council’s Chief Information Officer who also mentioned that through the use of Hangouts, Firefighters have managed to optimize their performance, thus be even better at saving lives.
Indeed the use of Chromebooks may bring about a huge gain for users, however if you’re thinking of buying one then there are some drawbacks needed to be taken into account:
Is It For You?
One such drawback, which also serves as a reason for why Chromebooks are usually cheaper than their counterparts, is the fact that they mostly come with a very small storage-space.
Since hard drives are ultimately expandable, whether they decay with time or their storage is filled up, Google is encouraging Chromebooks users to use Google Drive instead to store their files.
That may be fine if you don’t need a lot of space, because up to a certain amount Google lets you use Drive for free (you only need to subscribe), yet if you do plan to use a higher amount of disk space then you should know it’ll cost you (monthly).
Moreover, relaying on a storage space that is found somewhere in the Internet will make your machine less suitable for gaming, as connection speed and latency will play a significant role in its performance.
Also, it’s probably a good idea to mention security risks, especially if you have some sensitive data you don’t want anyone else to be able to read as everything you store is actually saved on a remote machine you don’t really hold full privileges to.
Of course, the latter point might also work the other way around in some cases, as we’ve seen lately, hackers may have easier time targeting your computer than that of a huge, security-aware company such as Google.
Another important aspect you should consider is graphics performance. Chromebooks are optimized for Internet use, they are pretty lightweight on resources meaning they don’t use a lot of resources and therefore they don’t come with a robust set of utilizable resources such as an advanced graphics card.
Depending on the model you purchase, you may find yourself not being able to play certain qualities of HD videos nor 3D ones, certainly, encoding and decoding might be an issue for you as well.
That said, if you’re only looking for a cheap machine that will enable you to browse the Internet, chat on social media and other activities of that sort, Chromebooks may nevertheless rank highly on your priority list.
