Tech companies have flooded the technology industry with new gadgets. Two of them are Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air and Google's Chromebook.
Specs
The ARM-based Samsung Chromebook has an 11.6-inch display with 1366 x 768 resolution with 200nit brightness. It weights 2.42 lbs and is 1.7 inches thin. It has a battery life of over 6.5 hours and runs on a Samsung Exynos 5 Dual processor with 100 GB Google Drive Could Storage with Solid State Drive. It features a VGA camera with a HDMI port and is Bluetooth 3.9 compatible. It runs Chrome OS, which means it has Google apps built in, and has a USB 3.0 port and USB 2.0 port. It starts at $249.
The Apple MacBook Air has a 13.3-inch high-resolution LED-backlit glossy widescreen display with support for millions of colors. It has a 1440 x 900 resolution and 1.8Ghz Intel Core i5 processor with 3MB L3 cache. It has 4GB of 1600Mhz DDR3 memory and 128GB of flash storage. It weighs 2.9 lbs with a height of 0.11-0.63 inches, width 12.8 inches and depth 8.94 inches. It features Intel HD Graphics 4000 with a Native Mini DisplayPort output. It has a 720p FaceTime HD camera and two USB 3 ports. It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 wireless technology. It has up to 7 hours of battery and runs on OS X Mountain Lion with all included software such as Safari, FaceTime, iLife, and iTunes. It starts at $1,199.
Comparison
The Chromebook is definitely lighter and cheaper than the MacBook. StarkInsider said that Chromebook is a "highly portable device, perfect for email, web-browsing, and cloud work."
GeekSugar.com said that Chromebook's apps are better than Apple's because it relies on Google cloud products like Gmail, Drive, Google+ Hangouts, etc. rather than the desktop-based storage and software of typical laptops.
"If you opt for the $329 Samsung Chromebook 3G and download these five key Chrome apps (remember, your Google account is already linked to Drive's word processing and spreadsheets), Chromebook will have you working like a pro and finding your pricier software-based laptop a distant memory," the review said.
Infoworld.com said that the Chromebook "deserves serious consideration" instead of the popular MacBook option.
Writer Simon Phipps dished on why he left his MacBook for a Chromebook. Some of the reasons were because he can work offline, he found set-up and usage to be very easy, and it gave him great HTML5 browsing. Also, the chrome apps "closed the deal." He found the Chrome Web Store "surprisingly populous" and found several useful applications such as ShiftEdit (an offline-capable code editor) and Evernote (for research and writing).
Some other things he noted:
"Switching between these full-screen apps and the tabbed browser is easy: There are dedicated keys on the Chromebook keyboard for it, along with browser keys (back, forward, reload, search) and controls for screen brightness and audio volume. The keyboard has a handy pop-up map (Crtl+Alt+/), and there are a large number of shortcuts for browser and device functions. For example, it's easy to take screenshots, to look at the task list, to cycle through browser tabs, and so on. The trackpad is nice and responsive, with support for common gestures and a clickable edge for those preferring a mouselike feel."
There are some concerns for the Chromebook though. It relies heavily on an Internet connection and mobile connectivity is still missing. Business Insider noted that unlike normal laptops, there's no file management system. "There is no way to effectively manage files that aren't Internet-based. If you don't have an Internet connection, you're extremely limited in what you can do," the website said.
"The Chromebook doesn't function like a laptop. It feels more like a $249 Web browser. If you're OK with dishing out that much to compute only within Google's Chrome ecosystem, then the Chromebook makes a great secondary device. However, it's not going to replace your primary machine," the website said. "It's not a laptop. It's not a tablet. It's a shell that houses a web browser. That's it."
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