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Robert Pogson reports:
Recent news about the popularity of Chromebooks with schools may seem puzzling.
Schools in Hillsborough, New Jersey decided to make an experiment out of its own program. Beginning in 2012, 200 students were given iPads and 200 students were given Chromebooks. After receiving feedback from both students and teachers, the schools sold off their iPads and bought 4,600 Chromebooks.
After all, a keyboard is a great input device and writing is one of the three "Rs" but why not just [buy] a notebook PC? The answer is that the high cost of maintaining the legacy PC is too great. Keeping content on the server makes the job easier and with Chromebooks, schools don't even need to own the server.
...then there's the malware, the slowing down, the re-re-rebooting with that other OS.
That makes the ChromeBook a winner in education and probably a lot of organizations large and small, even consumers. Of course, they could get those benefits with GNU/Linux but it would take more technical knowledge. Again Chromebooks win.
See iPad vs. Chromebook For Students
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13 2014, @03:33PM
Very much. I have a cluster of diskless systems that get their whole system and configuration as LTSP 'thick' clients. I maintain one system image. Anytime I can afford to expand the cluster, I only have to plug it in: DHCP tells it everything it needs to know. Same thing with MythTV clients at home. You only need to make sure you have the bandwidth to support it.
Which, I think is one of the big things contributing to the first death of the mainframe - people started wanting pretty graphical displays, and the network just wouldn't handle it. It'll be interesting to see what happens when all of those chromebooks start trying to watch the podcast of the lecture they're sitting in.