The move to an all-Cloud life is curving upwards. Most people have wifi most of the time they crack open their computers and mobile broadband hotspots are getting nearly cheap (more in my next post). Maybe we don't have to carry powerful laptops anymore?
In order to work with the high school class I help teach, I bought a Chromebook to match what the students have. I bought the best one out there and it was just $239 (in store is cheaper), many Chromebooks can be had for around $120. The specs are light in some ways, a 14" screen (1366x768), 2GB RAM, 16GB Hard drive (not a misprint), but it is made for connectivity and mobility: 1 HDMI port, 3 USBs ports (one is 3.0), SD slot, 802.11ac wifi, bluetooth, camera, a nearly 3000 mAh battery which seems to last forever (they always do at first, don't they?), and it comes with 1TB of Google Drive storage for two years for free - ah, there's the real hard drive. I do wish Google Drive was versioned content management, like Time Machine, but I can't even see old revisions of Google-originated documents, maybe I'm missing something.
I used the machine for only a few days, but it's clear that I can do nearly all of what I need to do on it, and I like the keyboard navigation better on it than a Mac. With my Mac crashing almost as much as Win98 now, and Macs being WICKED expensive, I have to consider if I could replace it for a mere $250 (with resale values on Macs seemingly near 95%). The Chromebook is about 10% lighter than my MacBook Pro 15", so I don't mind being lighter in the hand as well as the wallet.
When I moved to the Mac from Windows I moved everything to the cloud - a lot of that was moving things to Google Drive, much of it what have been great online services - Evernote, ToDoPro, Mint, and all the mobile apps and websites I use. I've already learned that machines come and go, but your data is always your data, so keep everything near permanent backed up to external hard drives (except my Google data, which I should do). The idea was to create OS independence, so I could move to - and away from - the Mac easily. Could I move to Chrome OS?
After 6 years, 3 Macs (one a used starter, one run over after 5 years - they do last, one recent replacement) and 3 iPhones (4S, 5S, 6Plus), I am still not very tied to MacOS/iOS. I am somewhat tied to Aperture (sort of, you can get at the pics underneath their database easy enough) but the only real major tie to is TimeMachine - one of the main reasons I moved to Mac in the first place. Since I have a lot of data backed up on Time Machine, I'll always need a Mac around, or a Virtual Machine for a MacOS, and I will always have that around. Heck I could always have a virtual machine for OS/2!
It's not just me, most people are far less tied to OS's now that we are all using apps in the cloud. In fact, maybe people are more tied to Google's main services than the various operating system they are using on their various devices. In the meantime, Chrome has recently become the majority browser. It's been a long war, but Chrome is winning and none of the competitors can recapture share (Microsoft and Opera certainly won't, Safari can only change as far as their OS penetration, and no further, and Firefox is improving but it will be hard to keep up without the same level of funding).
Chrome is now invading other OS's desktops. After adding a Chrome Extension, I automatically got this helpful new Google portal on my Mac dock, just like the one on my Chromebook's start menu.
Ah, so I can use all those apps that plug into Chrome on all my devices? Nice. I don't think it's hard to see Google growing their eyeshare from here.
But I'm a developer! How could I get along on a Chromebook? The time for development to move to the cloud is near, maybe not here, but near.
We almost had cloud-like development in the 1990's with ClearCase - a virtual file system, very similar to Google Drive, but with controllable versioning, like Time Machine (on steroids). It could never quite work because the files a developer edits were always local because the developer tools were always local so it was very slow as the compiler reached across the network to find the net file, 10,000 times. I can here some of my old IBM mainframe friends that they were developing in the cloud, and it's true, though the cloud was usually in the building.
In 2015, developers have many tools living in the cloud - editors, compilers, builders, test runners, test and production machines. They seem mature enough for Javascript development, though the tools for Java may be somewhat behind. (I'm trying out Cloud9, no review ready yet.) All we need now is a little terminal. Ah, but ChromeOS has bash and if that's not good enough, maybe Ubuntu on a Chromebook would work!
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