THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO… Chromebooks

These lightweight, cloud-based computers are gaining in popularity – here’s why you might (or might not) want to buy a Chromebook in 2020, and what to choose if you do

- David Nield

The first Chromebooks turned up in the summer of 2011, and it’s fair to say they’ve come a long, long way since then – while the core of being a laptop that focuses on the web is intact, they’re now much more capable when Wi-Fi is limited or not available at all, and their ability to run Android apps adds a whole new dimension to what you can expect from a laptop running Chrome OS.

Just about any app that runs on an Android phone will also now run on a Chromebook, straight from the Google Play Store. It’s just the latest in a series of leaps for what Chromebooks are capable of and how useful they can be.

Sometimes that means access to apps you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get on a laptop (like Instagram or Snapchat), and sometimes that means extra features that aren’t available on Windows and macOS (like the option to sync Netflix downloads for offline viewing).

At other times, app support just means having the option of using a web app or an Android app when you want to do something – whether it’s Twitter, Spotify, Google Docs, or whatever else. It’s made Chromebooks more versatile, and easier to use when they’re offline.

POWER UP AND UP

At the same time as Chromebooks have been becoming more powerful and versatile, web apps have been going from strength to strength too. Think about all the top-tier apps you can get at through a browser now: Spotify, Google Photos, Microsoft Word, Slack, Twitter, Skype, Plex, Netflix and many more. You may have noticed you’ve been spending more and more of your computing time inside a browser, and Chromebooks are perfectly placed to take advantage.