Author: Andrew West

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.

I completed my radio telephony exam yesterday. And that’s the final checkbox. Done. I just need to physically receive my license, and I’ll be allowed to carry passengers. Eep.

My first public performance in…3.5 years, I think? It went well, though the photos suggest I was not exactly Mr Expressive. Plus ça change. It was a competition, and I came 2 out of 5. Not too shabby. Thank you to @vitawilton for the lovely routine and indeed the entirely delightful Piccadilly Spotlight event.

After 2 years, 64 lessons, a bunch of exams, and a cross-country solo, I passed my Skill Test today. This is the big hurdle before getting a license – it’s pretty much the equivalent of the driving test.

You take an examiner on a flight, and they ask you to navigate and perform various manoeuvres: stalls, recovery from a spiral dive, simulated forced landings, tracking to a VOR, various types of non-simulated landing, and more. It’s quite the day!

I have one more minor box to tick: you need a specific license to broadcast on radio frequencies from a plane, and I need to do a ground-based exam for that. I’ll hopefully get that in the next couple of weeks. And then I’ll have my full license!

The Peripheral (Amazon Prime) doesn’t mess about. It drops you right in, and you’ve gotta keep up. You may struggle, as I did, because it takes no prisoners. But it’s worth it.

The year is 2032. There’s been an internal US war of some sort. VR is pretty immersive now, and ex-soldiers make a living in ‘sims’ – violent video games. But one soldier is continually outplayed by his younger sister, so when a new VR device arrives, and the money’s too good to pass up, he asks her to take his place. She lands in London, in a simulation so real she can actually feel what’s happening to her. It does not go well.

The future comes thick and fast and in deep grandeur. London is overlooked by statues the height of mountains. Sure, you think, whatever – it’s the future. But there’s a reason. There’s always a reason.

Everyone is intelligent and does the smart thing in any given situation. Everyone is capable of absorbing new information without requiring half an episode to freak out and be talked round. Everyone is gracious under pressure. Essentially: everyone behaves exactly as you’d hope you would if your reality were upended. But despite doing everything right, *it all still goes wrong*. I like this.

While everyone’s smart, some of them are proper psychotic. You think you’ve seen it all, but this show comes up with some truly appalling ways to behave. Geez. It helps that half the cast are Brits and the others have southern US accents to die for: the Brits sound super sinister in comparison. Plus they all get to say interesting stuff *all the time*, and are charismatic to a fault. One showdown in particular is just phenomenal – you’ll know it when you see it.

It’s not really a show you can make predictions about. From time to time you think you’ve got the lay of the land, but then there’s some whirlwind of new ideas and probably an unexpected robot and whoosh – everything’s different. Just enjoy the spectacle. This is to be expected as it’s based on a William Gibson novel: it stays true to his form. You just land in the world, and there’s a lot that’s incomprehensible for a while. It throws you the odd bone, but you spend a lot of time trying to stay afloat.

If you wanted to be a cheap critic you could say it exploits the sunk-cost fallacy. It’s a lot of work to figure out what’s going on, and your brain really does not want this to be a waste of your time. So it’s in your interest to think you’re enjoying it, and the threshold for backtracking is super high. And I agree that when people do this in the real world it’s a grubby trick. Continental philosophy innit. But for entertainment: bring it on. Exploit me. Manipulate my emotions as much as you like. Do whatever you gotta do to get me invested – that’s what I’ve signed up for.

I don’t think it’s all a trick, though. There’s enough food for thought that your brain chews on it for a day then cheerily spits stuff out when you want to sleep.

All in all: loved it; very exciting; favourite sci-fi since The Expanse; did I mention the adorable southern accents, you’ve never heard people tell each other to fuck off like this, come the metaverse I’m giving myself a Texas drawl.