Do You Need a Chromebook?

However much you love your Macs, a cheap and cheerful Chromebook could be their ideal companion. Let’s see how a Chrome OS notebook could augment your Apple computing needs.

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We know what you’re thinking. ‘Why on Earth would I need a Chromebook when I already have a MacBook?’ But would you take your MacBook, which could well cost up to £2000, on a hiking holiday when you might be trekking through the wilderness in the rain? Would you work on it in a coffee shop or down the pub? Would you take it camping for watching movies in the evening, knowing it would spend most of your vacation in your tent? Or maybe you only have a desktop Mac; would you buy a Mac notebook just to use on the occasional trip? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘No, it’s too expensive and/or valuable to risk,’ you might want to consider a much cheaper alternative; a Chromebook.

In a nutshell, a Chromebook is a very cheap notebook computer that sacrifices power for affordability. That’s not to say it offers a poor performance. Chromebooks run on the Google-developed Chrome OS operating system, which isn’t as powerful as macOS or Windows, but it has very low system requirements so it can run on much cheaper hardware. A Chromebook simply doesn’t need the powerful processors or large amounts of memory you’re used to using in your Macs.

Storage space is smaller and therefore cheaper too. A Chromebook is designed to be used in partnership with Googles apps and services such as Google Drive, with most of your work residing on the cloud for online access. Google apps such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, YouTube and, of course, the Chrome web browser are preinstalled.