10 years ago I started buying Chromebooks for our staff to use as travel/meeting machines. I’m now reluctantly moving to Windows, mainly because of hardware issues.
We’re a UK charity with a staff of 45 (25 back then). We run on Google Workspace. And all our staff need laptops. At the start, Chromebooks fit the bill nicely:
- They’re cheaper, lighter, and smaller than the equivalent Windows machine – certainly light enough to travel without being a hindrance
- They can be centrally administered, and it works really well. Google Workspace has a comprehensive list of configuration settings that are pretty secure by default. It’s easy, too – you didn’t need a PhD in Group Policy/VPNs and to be on top of every CVE.
- They’re encrypted out of the box, which means no data security issues when lost/stolen
- Cheaper and easier than a Windows deployment: you don’t need to pay for and administer a central server (as you did back then)
So everyone got a Chromebook. Being completely cloud-based in this way was fortuitous: in March 2020 everyone just went home and carried on. At this point some machines went from second machines to primary devices, so we upgraded people to more powerful models such as the flagship Pixelbook. Since then we’ve recruited a lot of fully-remote workers who’ve also needed powerful machines, and Chromebooks have worked for them too.
Occasionally they’d get lost or stolen. One memorably turned up in a garden in Kensington, presumably abandoned when the thief realised they couldn’t do anything with it. (The owner of the house turned it on, saw the email address, and got in touch).
As such I have seen a lot of Chromebooks. I have literally dozens of broken machines under my desk. I’ve tried high-end machines and the cheaper market. I’ve tried the big enterprise suppliers, and the regular Currys brands. I’ve opened them up, jailbroken them, done a thousand soft resets. I like to think I’ve seen the full spectrum of Chromebook life.
They no longer cut it for us. This is mainly because they’re let down by the hardware. Chrome OS is great, but the machines are not good enough over the medium term.
From a staff perspective Chromebooks have been ok: they work, and when they break a new one arrives quickly. But my IT department can’t administer them any more. I really wanted them to succeed, but I’ve finally reached my tipping point. Jumping ship to Windows + InTune is the better option, despite all the work that entails.
(We’ll of course stick with Google Workspace, which I continue to think is great. It’s just Chromebooks themselves that have to go)
This is due to:
Don’t last long enough
The average machine has lasted 2-3 years. Then they die and can’t be repaired. Compare this to the Dell Windows laptops, which in my experience merrily last 5+ (some are at 8 and still running fine after SSD upgrades).
I haven’t been cheap, either – these are not bargain-basement machines. Most were £500+, with the Pixelbooks getting up to £850.
No repair options
There are barely any spare parts, and the warranties aren’t long. I tried to get a few Pixelbooks repaired, and thought this would be ok given their prominence and expense. I was pretty sure they just needed new PSUs. But nobody would accept them for repair and you couldn’t even DIY it on eBay.
You can’t upgrade them either – very few had RAM slots or replaceable hard drives.
Model churn
Models of Chromebook disappear astonishingly quickly. I’d find something good, buy a few, and it’d vanish forever. For a while Dell had a nice model that we got bulk discounts on, but that was soon discontinued and not replaced. Even the Google Pixelbooks – the top-end model at the time – stopped being made after a couple of years. So you end up with a dozen models coexisting, each with their own little quirks. This is hard to manage.
Every time you need a new one you have to find reviews, which are themselves out of date pretty quickly. Often the reviews are from the US, and the models either aren’t available or the model numbers don’t match and you have to work out which is which. This wastes so much time.
And you have to read the reviews because a lot of the machines are crap. No RAM, terrible CPUs, useless keyboards, etc. I got the impression most manufacturers were churning out new models every couple of months to catch people looking for a shiny £250 laptop on Amazon.
Too many hardware issues
A solid minority were taken out by major hardware failures: trackpads going mad (this one scared people); screens failing; PSU failures.
In particular: the charging cables. These break regularly. Almost every Chromebook in the last few years has had to have a new charger. We have spares in the office at all times. Having established that the office softball team weren’t using them for practice, my main assumption is they don’t travel well and can’t stand being coiled up or something.
Slow down over time
Seriously, it was like Windows in the 2000s. I saw so many 18-month-old machines that were wading through treacle – even with SSDs.
This one is super-frustrating because I don’t have an answer to “why is this machine so slow?”, let alone a fix. Presumably it’s because Google are aggressive with Chrome OS and its needs. Except it’s ultimately just a wrapper for a browser – how can this be happening so quickly? Maybe the hardware is so bad that the CPUs soon overheat and have to throttle?
Sometimes I could nuke a few Chrome extensions (Grammarly is a toxin) and it would eke out a few more months. But often I was having to replace them after 2 years.
So
We’ll slowly transition to Windows + Azure AD + InTune, which is at least a lot easier than VPNs + AD + Group Policy was back in the day. It’ll still be more work. And the machines will be bigger and heavier. But they’re easy to buy, they’ll last a while, and I can fix them.