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Comment by abluecloud | Hacker News Reader

I guess they're realising that they're slightly more useful than iPads, and cheaper.

It's all about Google Docs. My kids' elementary school has gone completely gDocs for word processing and presentations (teacher and student areas). No more thumb drives for collaboration, and bringing work home is transparent.

I don't think it has to be one thing... I think that they are less expensive, and more usable are big things... having a separate keyboard for typing on is definitely a better use case for many over an on-screen keypad that takes up half the screen.

gDocs is probably a big influence as well... as an all around value, I really like the Chromebooks... from a security standpoint, I tend to like them for mom & granda even more... (with uBlock)

They're also easier to centrally manage and are completely user agnostic devices. iPads can be made to be use agnostic devices also, but you have to disable almost all of the built in apps (since iCloud doesn't really accomplish it), and have people sign into some online service each time (e.g. GApps, Office 365, etc).

There's something to be said for a device where you can just grab a new one off of the laptop cart, install nothing, and login as any user with the full experience available.

Windows domain-connected PCs kinda accomplish that, but with a lot more management overhead.

I never tried FireFox Portable ... hmmm, looks like it requires a Windows machine (or a Linux box running Wine)

That might have been interesting if Mozilla had been able to get it to run on Macs.

We have a spare/guest Chromebook and it's been nice to hand it to one of my two daughters when they've cracked the screen. I'm not in IT but I'm just imagining how much easier Chromebooks would make my life. Especially if the management software is even halfway-good.

My daughter lost a morning's work because she didn't save her composition in Microsoft Word (I think) on a MacBook. She's used to Google Docs automatically saving everything for her on her Chromebook.

I'm sure that Microsoft Word can be set to automatically save but somebody probably has to do that. And the school might have disabled it because the kids are sharing the MacBooks and still using thumb drives.

Microsoft Word automatically saves backup copies of files, and has done for at least a decade.

Yes, but it seems reasonable that it would be turned off for laptops that are swapped every class, whether Windows or Macs (in this case).

If Bobby or Betty just lets it save, now you have to find the laptop the doc was automatically saved to.

Or maybe it was saved to the machine instead of her thumb drive and the IT guy just told her she lost it.

I try to do tech support for my kids and parents hands-on because details that don't matter to them do matter to the OS or apps.

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