[hnnsj]

Forgive my ignorance, but when I was introduced to the Chromebook concept a few years ago, it was basically supposed to be a cheaper "thin" (not physically necessarily but spec-wise) computer mostly running web apps. Now they're instead high-end laptops. Are they no longer about running mostly web apps, or what? What changed in the last couple of years? Why is this hardware needed? I don't get it.

[Filligree]

Now they run Android apps as well.

Also, the web changed; there are webapps that require gigabytes of memory out there, such as Gmail.

All respect to Google, I use a Chromebook for offline writing and general browsing and it's wonderful, but I agree that I'm not seeing the use-case for this one yet.

Maybe they'll port Android Studio to it? That might be pretty nice.

[terminalcommand]

Nowadays browsers use relatively a lot of resources. I don't know how ChromeOS handles tabs, but I imagine running everything in a browser takes a toll on performance.

I remember the agony I experienced when I needed to use Word365 online for a project. The javascript implementation was so slow and resource heavy that I was almost going to go crazy. Google Docs on the other hand worked fine most of the time. But none of them could replace a native MS Office or Libreoffice. Maybe with webassembly things are going to get different, but adding abstraction layers come at a cost.

Also these machines need to run videos and process pictures and maybe movies. With those requirements performance doesn't hurt.