Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron
arstechnica.com
Op-ed: PC makers used to need to bring their own add-on bloatware—no longer.

Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron | Op-ed: PC makers used to need to bring their own add-on bloatware—no longer.::Op-ed: PC makers used to need to bring their own add-on bloatware—no longer.

  • itsJoelle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    For some reason you seem to be telling me the performance and capabilities of Chromebooks running Windows which I do find very strange as it’s obviously a subject I have a great deal more experience as you can do a pretty large amount of anything you need to do on one

    Cause you’re talking about running Windows on an Intel/AMD chip. Usually Intel Celerons on the cheap end. It’s not a niche area of knowledge. And plenty devices run that configuration stock. Just because Windows has been installed on it doesn’t raise the inherent upper bound of the silicon. And you’re right — much like the smart phone market — it is able to meet the needs of people handily and the lower end is much higher than what it used to be. And I agree that people are often overpaying for tech regularlly. But there are tasks the silicon is ‘priced’ out of because, while possible on the lower end chips, it becomes hard for them to keep up. That is why I’m confused whenever you claim a Chromebook “does more” than a Macbook.

    I brought up very specific things: rendering video, 3-d modeling tasks, and a set of recently released AAA titles that run well. They’re a family of common things people do with their devices that are really computationally expensive the computer was designed to do (prolly shouldn’t game on a Mac tho, but I find it funny). Those are in a different computation league than running GIMP, office, or a drawing app. Your claim was “Definitely does more than a MacBook Air and for a lot less” and I’m trying to point out there are things bound by the silicon it cannot do as well by comparison (granted we went off on a few tangents). Like, the headroom just isn’t there. The Celeron family gets blown out of the water, and those running Intel i3’s and Intel i5’s fall behind as well. Some of those i3/i5’s get suspiciously close to MacBook territory in price tho.

    I’m wondering though, is all this time, were you meaning they get more “bang for your buck?” If so, I agree, and I may have focused on “Definitely does more,” as in the set of things an ARM-silicon Mac can achieve is a subset of what a Chromebook can, and got really confused.

    However, this device confuses both of us. Why.

    • The_Mixer_Dude@lemmus.orgEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      “does more” means more functional, I think I explained that up above. I think you have again sort of glossed over touchscreen functionality and the ability to flip your screen around into tablet mode. A laptop is a portable computer, touchscreen and screen flipping allow for the Device to be even more portable and functional for the user who had decided to purchase a laptop as opposed to a desktop.

      This is all very important stuff to be aware of as for a lot of industries and use cases can’t make use of a laptops form factor as it is just too cumbersome. This is why they are so popular in stem and creative fields, not to mention healthcare, education, and service industries. This may not be as large of a factor for someone working in graphic design or software development but at the same time it really makes just as much sense as a typical laptop.

      I could go on about the functional benefits of having a touchscreen and having a tablet but really that list is just so massive and everyone who uses one of aware of that which is why the market is shifting over that direction so quickly. Helped in part by the fact that they are popular purchases for companies to buy for their employees and anyone who uses a 2in1 at work is typically going to end up buying one for themselves as it’s really not a great experience going back to how things used to be.

      Now you mention running AAA game titles and I’m finding that pretty hard to track down titles getting mentioned unless they are games of some serious age or you are trying to qualify games like baldurs gate 3 and the Sims 4 as AAA titles which is rather disingenuous. As far as I see people talking about with Mac gaming they tend to suggest people use Xbox cloud or other game streaming services. Obviously you get a much wider selection of games than the Mac available library when going that route especially with something like a MacBook Air where storage comes at a premium and typical AAA titles are coming in above the 100gb mark now. This would make things even more difficult for someone doing video editing as well especially if they are working in 4k resolution. You could go the route of using an external drive as well but that sorta saps the portability when you have all the extras hanging off your computer at which point if I was serious about doing either of those things I would be using a desktop anyhow to gain the benefits seen there. As for where our Chromebook stands in this situation, well, they can stream cloud service games and even stream games locally from a desktop gaming PC (as I commonly do) just the same as a MacBook Air can.

      (Btw I got curious and tried using blender on one of the Chromebooks and I’ll be damned if it didn’t run surprisingly well, loaded a bunch of demo projects and it was pretty great. I also discovered that using touchscreen with blender was pretty awesome, made sculpting super easy as well as animating and modeling, camera controls are actually really intuitive, ran great in Evee and workbench, cycles was a little sluggish , but with evee in viewport render mode it was actually pretty smooth, definitely workable, material preview and solid were both pretty great as well)