Maybe this is a hot take. However, a lot of the Chromebooks that were deployed by schools during covid are build like tanks while being super lightweight and having great battery life. Meanwhile the old thinkpads are 10 years old and are probably starting to wear down. Many Chromebooks support coreboot these days so theoretically they have the potential to be more private and secure. Some of them are also arm which means that they are more efficient from an architecture perspective.
Edit:
I like how incredibly controversial this is. I have successfully split the votes
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The problem with chromebooks is that the base specs are pretty shit. A lot of them have 4 GiB of RAM and maybe 16GiB of disk if you’re lucky.
They were designed to be thin clients to connect students to the internet, and little else. Maybe they could be hacked into something useful, but I don’t think it’ll ever make a good PC. They were always destined for the landfill.
Meanwhile, the best thinkpads were quality machines back when they came out. IMO, that’s why they’re still so versatile today. Free software can’t fix bad fundamentals.
They are built like tanks? The Chromebook laptops I’ve come across were flimsy as aluminiumfoil. The plastic hinges were so weak you had to try to not tear the screen from the keyboard!
That has not been my experience. If that was the case schools wouldn’t be buying them.
At least here I’m pretty sure schools just buy them because they come laughably cheap. Actually, my middle school’s laptops weren’t very durable either but just cheap.
Actually, now that I think of it, Chromebooks can be manufactured by anyone just like Windows laptopa, a Chromebook is just any laptop with ChromeOS pre-installed. There are probably well-built ones (maybe by Lenovo, even?) and there are probably flimsy-made ones, depending on your manufacturer?
Google ran a huge push to get these into schools too… There was a LOT of pressure on Schools to adopt from various partners (or at least that happened in the UK)…
Google is aware of the Microsoft gains from getting people used to their products at a young age…
Lot easier to swap parts on a thinkpad.
That’s a fair point
Chromebooks? Built like tanks?
Maybe if you folded origami tanks and spritzed them with water. They’re cheap, they’re cheaply made, and they’re made to be e-waste.
It depends
There are a lot of devices geared toward schools. Many of these devices are certified to be dropped and have keyboards that are completely sealed. They are designed for students who are abusive and highly destructive. Some even have military certifications. I’ve scene these devices survive being stepped on and covered in coffee
As an IT technician in a school, I have to repair Chromebooks of many different models on a regular basis, mostly from Dell and Lenovo. I haven’t seen one that I would consider durable yet. All of them use butterfly switches that break when a child rips off the keycap, meaning the whole keyboard has to be replaced. It is also common for the brass inserts into which the hinges are screwed to pop out of the plastic on most models due to rough handling. We also had one Lenovo model where almost every device we put into service developed a no power issue due to the same ceramic capacitor going short. Of course, the display panels are just normal panels that crack when struck - that is probably the most common damage we have to deal with.
I’m not so sure… for the following reasons:
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Despite using a version of the Linux kernel in ChromeOS, Chromebooks don’t always have the best hardware (ie. driver) support from the mainline kernel used by most distributions. That’s why there are niche distributions like GalliumOS which provide tweaks to support the touchpad and audio devices in many Chromebooks. It’s similar to how Android is Linux, but it’s not standard Linux as we are familiar with (so the hardware support is different).
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Many Chromebooks have really poor specs: low-wattage CPUs, small amounts of storage, low amounts of RAM. While they may be newer, they are actually probably less performant than older laptops. This has changed in recent years with the new Chromebook plus program (or whatever it is called) which mandates a reasonable set of baseline features, but that is talking about current Chromebooks and not the ones from the COVID era.
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Related to the previous point, many Chromebooks are not serviceable or upgradeable while Thinkpads and some recent laptops are. You are unlikely to open up a Chromebook and be able to replace say the RAM or SSD, which would be a show stopper for a lot of people that like Thinkpads.
So… unfortunately, I think this take is a bit of a miss and I dont’ really see it happening. I would be happy to be proven wrong though since my kids have two Chromebooks from the COVID era :}
The thing is Chromebooks are flooding the market. You can get a devices for like 40 USD
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Most Chromebooks from the last 5 years have 8 GB of RAM and 32/64 GB internal drive. That’s not enough to satisfy the kind of user who would buy a Thinkpad.
I have 4 Chromebooks that I converted to Linux, from the era before the aforementioned, with 4 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal space (and just 1366x768 res – kdenlive and some cad apps don’t fit in that res, not even some of the DE pref panels fit!). At 16 GB internal disk, only Debian fits in there properly. Mint and all ubuntu-based ones, or fedora are either out of space, or with only 1 gb left (Debian leaves 8 GB free). Also, it’s near impossible to use a modern web browser to browse the web with 4-5 tabs at the same time at 4 GB of RAM – you always hit the swap sooner than later. So it’s literally bare bones experience.
The newer Chromebooks, with 8 GB RAM and 32/64 internal space are definitely better, but still nowhere near the “modern” specs required to run Linux properly (especially if you also want to do some video editing). In fact, look at the Cosmic DE. While it’s new, and without any code fluff, it requires a minimum of 2.4 GB of RAM just to boot (which is more than gnome/kde).
So yeah, Chromebooks have nothing on Thinkpads. Not for the kind of users who buy thinkpads anyway.
I have only seen devices with 4gb of ram.
2nd comment with the same typo, are you using dictation?
I have been repurposing my EOL Chromebook, and I don’t think they will ever be able to compete with ThinkPads. I like my Chromebook since it is so damn small, however the specs are really bad. And everything is soldered right on the motherboard. So I have 64GB storage (plus an SD-card) and 4GB RAM. I have enabled ZRAM so the CPU is helping out a bit. But even so I struggle with the memory. Browsers are such memory hogs!
Hot take. 🍿
Actually these devices are pretty cool as the usually have a TDP of 5-7 Watts
I don’t disagree, I was just commenting from the angle of how enthusiastic many are about ThinkPads.
I don’t know too much about Chromebooks myself, so I look forward to the banter in order to learn more.
There’s certainly a case to be made for saving Chromebooks from the landfill by installing Linux. There will be plenty of people who will be happy to have one. But that will be a different target audience than the people who use old ThinkPads.
School grade Chromebooks are some of the toughest devices on the market
As others have mentioned, perhaps while the metaphor is weak, your spirit is strong!
My kid’s Chromebooks (I purchased for them before the school provided) reached EOL before they finished elementary school.
I installed Linux (Gentoo) so we could continue using them. When power is correctly configured, they were very cool to use as a quick tool to search for something, answer an email, write a quick document and other simple tasks. They did not work well as workstations as an old Thinkpad might.
Since they are so light, and the battery lasted forever, we would leave them on a counter, and pick them up as needed.
Thinkpads are fairly powerful as laptops go. Are you talking about some very strong variety of chromebook here?
The ones from schools are very tuff. I wouldn’t call a 10-15 year old thinkpad powerful
No way. My T420 with a 3.4ghz 4c8t i7 absolutely outpaces any celeron POS Chromebook. Either you don’t have much experience with good (T-series) Thinkpads or you don’t have much experience with Chromebooks.
I think they mean powerful as in compute power, and since they’re designed to be thin clients, the answer is no. They’re universally underpowered the day they come out.
New Thinkpads are still great Linux laptops, so there’s a steady stream of newer 2nd hand models coming on the market.
Stupid fucking Lenovo is starting to buy back EoL computers. I swear it’s to cut down on the available second hand computers on the market.
Can’t have poor people having decent things to use for cheap.
That’s news to me - and a bit of a dick move.
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I’m not a thinkpad guy, but I thought one reason for people liking old thinkpads is that the old ones came with cpu’s that predate the intel management engine.
Exactly. The ARM Chromebooks can run coreboot in a lot of cases. I am not sure about WiFi and GPU acceleration but at least those can be isolated if necessary.
Coreboot does not remove IME. Libreboot (a coreboot distro) does. Or neuter it.
It can be configured however you want. Also ARM devices don’t have ME
Thinkpads were the enterprise standard. They were well documented and had full spec implementations of software. This was the reputation that built the icon.
I don’t trust anything from Google and especially anything with ARM. I’ll use Graphene, but only because of the TPM chip that can better prove what is happening in hardware when absolutely every mobile device made is a heap of shit hardware.
With a computer I have better options. When I was younger and dumber, I thought Android was great because it was Linux. Since then I learned that the entire scheme of Android is a way for google to enable and manipulate an industry while stealing ownership of all consumer devices using orphaned kernels to depreciate devices.
I learned my lesson. Everything google touches is a shitty scheme. Everything from the “free” stalkerware internet model that has completely undermined the third pillar of democracy (free press/freedom of information), the ownership over a part of me that is used to manipulate me, to the theft of my device itself; nothing google does is ever in your best interest. The only time it is worth buying google stuff is with an extremely well reasoned group like Graphene OS that have nothing to do with google and are not in any way funded by or associated with google.
ARM is dead in the water. The writing is on the wall. The same last hoorah of hardware happened when Power PC, and the 68k Motorola stuff was about to die. The most important thing to know is how Apple actually works and has always worked when it is successful. Apple leverages sinking ship silicon with buying power, and next level software development to squeeze all the untapped potential out of the device. All of the bugs and issues are fairly well known and documented. This low grade trailing edge hardware is placed in a pretty dress and marketed to people that are clueless about actual hardware. These people are paying a premium. Their stuff works great and performs quite well for what it is, but nothing about it is cutting edge. Apple profits from selling old tech as a premium product. The 6502 was a hackjob that started the trend and it only existed because it was a third as much money as all other processors. That was its only real selling point. Their fab quality was so bad, MOS couldn’t compete with the speeds of their competition. They came up with the first dual instruction loading pipeline to try and get anywhere near the speeds of Zilog, Intel, and Motorola. This is how Apple started; with the 6502. The only architecture that Apple has ever used that has not already failed is x86. When Apple chooses ARM, that is the death knell. The true tell about ARM is how it was sold by the original Acorn group ownership right after RISC-V won the legal case against UC Berkeley for full independence. The entire business model of ARM is to keep everything proprietary. This is a key player in theft of ownership and the dystopianism of the present neo feudal digital age. This is the polar opposite of the original legacy of the IBM Thinkpad. The present hardware with Thinkpad stickers doesn’t come close to that original legacy in any way. The world is more complicated now. But, we have tools like Linux hardware probe to find what works and what doesn’t, and distros like Fedora just work.
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