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Lemmy predicts: Chromebooks will become the new Thinkpads

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.

0x0 ,

My old Thinkpads disagree.

LeFantome ,

Modern Chromebooks are typically slower and more resource limited than even quite old laptops ( like Thinkpads ). They may also be difficult to service and expand.

Chromebooks as a class may become common devices. Sadly though, I think most of them are destined to be e-waste.

j4k3 , (edited )
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

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.

LeFantome , (edited )

I am a big RISC-V fan and often write how it will eventually push ARM down but let me do the opposite here.

Apple Silicon uses the ARM ISA but Apple designs the chips themselves and TSMC makes them. This makes it a very different situation from PowerPC.

TSMC offers more advanced manufacturing than Intel does. This is not changing anytime soon. From that perspective, Intel looks to be more in the PowerPC seat this time around. Their recent troubles are going to hang a serious anchor on their R&D. It is not at all clear what their future looks like.

Add to this the timing of Intel stumbling just as the Qualcomm X Elite chips enter the market and we have a very interesting competitive moment. Power and battery life matter a lot these days. Will it matter enough to counter speed bumps in app compatibility? We will see.

Independent of Apple, ARM may become viable in the Windows space and that would be entirely new. If it does not happen, it does not really hurt Apple. However, if ARM does take a cut of the Windows market, it does hurt Intel and puts them more into the place PowerPC was historically. If X Elite ( ARM ) does not fail on Windows, it will probably become the preferred option on laptops. If that happens, maybe it reduces Apple market share as well but not enough to push Apple off their own silicon.

As long as Apple sells enough volume, they can continue to design their own chips. It does not even matter how well ARM themselves are doing. If Apple continues to be good at it, there is no reason to switch.

So, while it sounds like you and I may agree about RISC-V vs ARM, remember that Apple does not buy their chips off of ARM. Apple gets its chips from TSMC and, far from being “old tech”, they are buying manufacturing process superior to anything Intel has access to. Also, Apple’s market is not just laptops and desktops. They are using Apple Silicon in all those iPhones and iPads at volumes that dwarf the PC side.

The reason that Apple moved away from PowerPC ( and Motorola before that ), was because of the economics. With only 15% of the PC market, Apple was the primary driver of PowerPC and had to fund all its innovation ( including manufacturing ). Now, they have control of the design and use it to serve much higher volumes while TSMC ( biggest in the world ) drives the manufacturing at the forefront of the industry. Most importantly, Apple is not really impacted at all by the success of the rest of the ARM space. If ARM fails, it does not really hurt Apple. If ARM is very successful, maybe it helps Apple a bit with more software available, especially on alternative OS like Linux. But alternative OS options for Apple hardware are a mixed blessing for them anyway.

It is a very different world m.

Ensign_Crab ,

Lot easier to swap parts on a thinkpad.

kenkenken ,
@kenkenken@sh.itjust.works avatar

Probably we don’t need new Thinkpads. And the old either. The main motivation behind the desire of people to by old Thinkpads is a desire to be a part of the club and culture, to look like a hacker, a geek. The same motivation had early apple fanboys. I hope smarter people will become less dependent from such crowdthinking phenomena not more.

solrize ,

Old thinkpads work well and (opposite of Apple) they are cheap. I buy them from familiarity but am open to other suggestions in that price range.

0x0 ,

Don’t feed the trolls, please.

intelisense ,

New Thinkpads are still great Linux laptops, so there’s a steady stream of newer 2nd hand models coming on the market.

crazyminner ,

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.

intelisense ,

That’s news to me - and a bit of a dick move.

0x0 ,

Source?

jrgn ,

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!

lord_ryvan ,

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!

thingsiplay ,

zipso.net/chromebook-specs-comparison-table/ I didn’t know there were so many Chromebooks. I’m no longer in school (for long time) and don’t know if German schools get any netbooks or Chromebooks to work with.

SnotFlickerman , (edited )
@SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

docs.mrchromebox.tech

A lot of Chromebooks can have Linux natively put on them.

I see a lot of pooh-poohing of the idea in this thread, but I think there’s people who are willing to do so.

I just took an old Lenovo ThinkCentre Chromebox 10H5 and modified the UEFI firmware with the walkthru from MrChromebox to put Xubuntu on it. It’s actually pretty snappy despite its limited hardware.

Also, I upgraded the 16gb M.2 SSD into a far more sufficient 256gb size.

The shortage of RAM is rough, but it can still be a workhorse in a lot of ways. I plan on replacing Xubuntu with a server version to get a little boost out of running it headless to drop the RAM going to rendering a GUI.

pnutzh4x0r ,
@pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org avatar

I’m not so sure… for the following reasons:

  1. 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).
  2. 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.
  3. 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 :}

OneCardboardBox ,

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.

pastermil ,

I don’t not necessarily agree, but I like your prediction. Let’s see if it turns out correct. Time will tell.

n.b.: am a Thinkpad enthusiast myself

KickMeElmo ,

ARM is the biggest reason this is unlikely to happen imo. Software compatibility is key.

GravitySpoiled ,

How does arm limit that?

arm is up and coming

KickMeElmo ,

For a laptop style system, the vast majority of users expect x86_64 software to just work. There are ARM versions for some things, and some can be recompiled by a knowledgeable user, but most software simply won’t run.

GravitySpoiled ,

So?

Arm usage is increasing, not decreasing

cizra ,

We’re at [email protected], hon. The average user uses a package manager. The majority of software is open-source and compiles for ARM just fine. Games excepted, but they won’t run on the low specs anyway.

0x0 ,

most software simply won’t run.

…for the time being…

wesker ,
@wesker@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Hot take. 🍿

possiblylinux127 OP ,

Actually these devices are pretty cool as the usually have a TDP of 5-7 Watts

wesker ,
@wesker@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

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.

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