The Chromebook and the College Student

My son is a college senior, when he entered college, we made sure he had the computer he wanted- a MacBook.  He carried it all over campus for three years, he wrote lots of papers, did lots of research, played numerous games and listened to all kinds of music.  Then it crashed.  The folks at our local Mac repair shop suggested that a new motherboard for about $750 dollars would get it back up to speed.

He made a decision before he began his senior year that he was not going to repair it for about ¾ the cost of the original.  He went to Best Buy, saw the Chromebook for under $200 dollars, made quick calculations, and put his own, hard-earned money down.

He is about eight weeks from finishing his senior year, and h has been using that Chromebook to do everything he did with his Mac.  Does he miss the Mac? Yes, but not as much as he would have missed another $800+ dollars.

He was home for Spring Break last week, and I asked him some specific questions about his experience with his Chromebook, and here is what he said.

• The email experience has not changed. His campus uses a Gmail app for correspondence, so the Chromebook is ideally suited for that.
• Writing papers is not really that different with the Chromebook according to him.  He explained that doing footnotes and endnotes are completely possible and formatting to professors’ wishes are not a an issue, you just have to dig deeper in menus to make some of it happen compared to Word on the Mac.
• He uses it roughly the same way that he did his Mac for streaming media such as Netflix, YouTube, music stations and playing downloaded music. (he still keeps an ancient iPod that he uses for most of his music).
• The screen is small, and is a problem when he has to be at the laptop for hours at the time.  However, he uses workstations with larger monitor on campus regularly, signs into his Google account, and he is business. (His screen is about the same size as the lowest cost MacBook Air available ($899 dollars).  His old laptop was a 13 inch model MacBook and now costs $1299.
• He thinks battery life is one of the best factors of the Chromebook--he goes mostly all day with one charge, something he never got out of his old Mac.
• He uses Google Drive for keeping all of his files organized, and uses it regularly to print papers and documents from campus print stations.

He made some very practical decisions in his senior year of college--$800+ dollars in savings to use a piece of hardware that does almost anything he wants it to do means that much more in the food budget over the year.