The Best Chromebooks on the Market
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This is Your Money Matters from The Wall Street Journal.
Welcome to Your Money Matters. I'm J.R. Whalen in New York. Time was when someone said that somebody is good with computers, they were probably talking about an adult. Nowadays, that can be applied to almost anyone over the age of five. That has parents, by way of Santa Claus, of course, seeking out the best Chromebook to get for the holidays. Wall Street Journal personal tech editor Wilson Rothman is here with us, and he's on the market for a laptop for his 9-year-old daughter and has some thoughts for consumers ready to buy a Chromebook for their family. So, Wilson, you write in your story in the Wall Street Journal that Chromebooks are particularly good for kids. Now, why is that?
Well, for starters, a large number of them are using Chromebooks at schools. I mean, the Chromebook, because it looks like a laptop but it's a little easier to use, it's more like an iPad in some of the way you use it, it has become a huge seller for schools, for elementary schools, the K-8 more than anything. the high school where they have very specific needs. So every kid, you know, 35 million kids have Google for Education logins, and a huge chunk of those kids are doing it at school with Chromebooks. So they come home and they're like, it's a Chromebook, Dad. It's not a laptop. It's a Chromebook. So right there, you're like, OK. The other thing is Chromebooks average price is, you know, somewhere in the 200 to 300 dollar range.
And that's only stepped up slightly from from there earlier. I mean, they used to be super cheap, but retailers wouldn't really sell them when they were super cheap. No money in it. So you've got this kind of really nice sweet spot in that, I say, the $400 to $500 range where you have very impressive laptops that could rival $1,000 Mac products, $800 Windows products, and they're $500.
And just so everyone understands, Chromebook laptops and tablets, they use the Google Chrome browser and they run the Linux brand Chrome OS as its operating system. So it is very different from an Apple laptop.
It's different, but just remember this. If you spend most of your day in a browser, which honestly most of us do, you don't miss a whole lot. And if you spend the rest of the time on computers using your phone and apps, the good news is Chromebooks can run Android apps. So if you like to listen to Spotify while you're working on your document, well, there you go. Pull up Google Docs. You type your document while you're streaming Spotify music.
And that's one of the things that can actually make this, you write about in your story, that they make the Chromebooks good for the adults also. You can download Google Play Music and you can download Netflix content also for later use.
Right, yeah. So one of the early criticisms of Chromebooks was you had to be online for them to really work. And of course, anytime you're in a browser and you want to go to a website, that's true. But with apps, with these Android apps and with some of the Chrome features of the more recent versions of the OS, you're able to do an awful lot offline. And like you say, I've downloaded Amazon video content, and then you can just pop it up later and watch it even if you have no Wi-Fi. Tell me about the ones that you like the most. Sure. In my hunt for the best laptop for my kid, two of them popped up for different reasons. One of them was huge. It's Acer's Chromebook 15. It's a 15.6-inch laptop, which for Windows machines is not huge, but Chromebooks are often smaller, and this thing is just a really nice big widescreen laptop.
Why are Chromebooks a good choice for kids and schools?
And I found – I remember playing the movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou on it. It was great. I pulled up this movie and I sat back and I was like I could just watch a movie on this thing. It's a really nice viewing experience. Great viewing experience and it's $400. This laptop, it's a big laptop for $400. Wow. My other favorite, Samsung makes a great mobile product. We all know Samsung phones are really, really sharp. The screens are beautiful.
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