- What's up guys? Pete Moriarty here recording
another quick video for you and today, again, we are
talking about Chromebooks. I'm getting so many
questions about Chromebooks this week which is awesome. I really love answering these guys and yeah, thanks so much for asking them. We've got questions from
Lela, questions from Andy and we've got one more
from Ben as well this week. So I'm gonna do my best to answer them. In this video I'm gonna
share what things can't a Chromebook do? So if you're listening
in make sure you say hi, give us a wave and we'll get started. So before I get into what
a Chromebook can't do I'm gonna quickly, very quickly recap on what's a Chromebook great for just so we can remember
what we're talking about, what these devices are used for. Number one, they're low cost, they have ridiculous battery life, right, so they can last a very long time. Number three, they're shareable and number four, they're secure right? So by shareable I mean because they're all tied to your Goggle account it means that anyone can
pick up a Chromebook, sign in with a Google account and have all their stuff there. It means the devices make
great shared devices. So if you've got staff out on the road and they need to, you know, share a device in a truck between multiple people, it makes it really easy. Or if you wanna buy one and just chuck it in your boardroom, then that's also very useful for that as well. Number two, it's secure
because they're locked and connected to your Google account it means that you can remote wipe. It means no one's gonna
access that machine that you don't want to
access that machine. It means that if you wanna deploy a policy to all of the Chromebooks
across your business that says, you know, from
something as simple as, changing the background picture to something more advanced
like disabling the camera or not allowing someone to
tether it to their phone. I don't know why you'd wanna do that. But any of the features
you wanna lock down or change or rollout to any Chrome devices you can do from an admin panel. Now previously you had to do those by investing in a Window's server, an active directory,
and IT people to run it and all of that other mess. Well Chromebooks just
completely eliminated all those mess. So that's what Chromebooks do really well, that's the purpose for Chromebook. So what can you do on them? You can work with web apps, most of our work nowadays
is done on the web. The modern worker spends
about four or five hours a day in web-based apps. We are no longer using desktop-based apps in the work day for most people. Number two, you can also
use any Android apps on modern Chromebooks. So I've got my Pixelbook
here, my Google Pixelbook so it flips over, it's got the touchscreen which is pretty cool. I've got my notes on Google Keep right now that I'm using for this video. But any Android app that I want I can actually install on that Google, on my Google Chromebook
which is really great because it means that if, I don't need to, but if I wanted to I could install something like, I could
install something like Microsoft Excel, I could
install Microsoft Word and use, not the native Window's versions, not the MAC versions,
but the Android versions of those which are actually pretty good because I've tested them out. If I wanted another app like Skype, which wasn't available
in the Chrome Web Store, I can use the Android version of Skype on my Chromebook as well. So you'll find that for most apps, if they have a decent Android version, then you're gonna be able to
get them running on Chromebook. Now where does it trip up? Where do we start to run into problems? That's the million dollar question. And if you were to ask me, what things do I miss after two years of running on a Chromebook
as my primary machine? Let me list about a few. Number one, and this is I
think the most obvious one, hardcore media editing, right? So that's image editing and video editing. You can do light softcore editing of images and videos,
but the hardcore stuff doesn't really work. Now what do I mean by that? Well Googles got the basics
of a image manipulation tool built into Chrome, right? So, built into Chrome or WES. So if you need to resize an image, change, you know,
exportism as a JPG or PNG, you can do that, all
of those basics, right? There are also apps in the Chrome Store which allow you to do those kind of basic image manipulations. Now it's not a Photoshop and if you really need a Photoshop
if you wanna apply certain styles, if you're a
professional photographer, then it's just not gonna
work for you, right, that's not what this
machine is designed to do. You can get the absolute basics done but it's not gonna be great. Now personally for most
of my photo editing and touch ups and what not, I'm using Google Photos for that. That happens to all happen in the web and you can do it quite
a bit with Google Photos. You can change exposure,
you can do things like, you know, crop and resize and do all of those kind of things so that's pretty straightforward right? But hardcore image editing, if you are a professional photographer and you really wanna use your Photoshop it's probably not gonna work great. Number two, G'day Tom, how ya going? Thanks for saying hi. So number two is hardcore video editing, so I shoot a lot of video personally as well as for the business but personally I shoot a lot of video
because I like film making. So I've got a drone, I've got a GoPro. When I'm out on the weekend and I'm doing dumb stuff in my jeep I
wanna film it all in 4K so I can put it on Facebook and YouTube and that kind of stuff. But I get all this footage and it really just doesn't work on
the Chromebook, right? I can edit short videos and
snip little bits and pieces together using online video editors but for the most part
their pretty sucky, right? If you wanna do hardcore video editing, if you want story and music and bringing lots of clips together and B-roll and the kind of filmmaking that a professional filmmaker would do, then it's just not gonna
work on a Chromebook, it sucks, I've tried
all of the Chrome apps, they suck, and I end up
using my iMac at home. This is the only reason why I'm tempted to maybe pick up like a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air to take with me while I'm traveling because I like to make films when I travel. You know like I like to, I
like to do that kind of stuff. So it's just not gonna happen on a Chromebook unfortunately,
don't expect it to happen. One of my good friends, Jake Howard, said something really
interesting about this and he basically said,
look me not being able to do this fiddly work, the image editing, the video editing, is fantastic because that forces me to
delegate and I personally, I love that as well. If I'm forced to delegate because I just can't do that stuff that I would otherwise be doing because I wanna do, then
it forces me to delegate. Now obviously with my film making that's something I don't wanna delegate I wanna do that on the weekends 'cause that's a personal pleasure for me, but anything work related, that
I can't do on the Chromebook is potentially something
that I should be delegating to someone else. What the Chromebook is really great for is running meetings, leading a team, responding to emails
if you need to do that, working on Google spreadsheets, working on any of your Cloud Apps, reading ba-ra-d-st-own reviews, drawing pictures with the stylus if you wanna do that, taking notes in Google Keep, joining Hangouts, listening to music. On the personal side of things I can do all of my internet banking, I can watch Netflix, I can do any of that kind of stuff on the Chromebook it's just that hardcore media editing where it starts to slowdown. Now talking about
slowdowns, people can ask well how powerful is a Chromebook, how many types can I have open and how quickly, you know,
how quickly do they run? And in my last video I explained all the different models
are of Chromebooks and which ones are kind of faster and which ones are kind of slower and what price range do
you wanna be spending depending on the kind of
work that you're doing. But you may be spending,
if you're a business owner, you're probably gonna be spending the six, seven, $800 mark on
a decent mid-range Chromebook or if you wanna go up to something nicer like Pixelbooks you're
spending a little bit more but you're getting
something that's gonna be a real decent workhorse. Okay, so finally, one
more question from Ben and that question was what about Adobe Creative Suite and the other apps like InDesign, and I just said, well flat out no, they're
Windows or MAC only, they're not gonna work on a Chromebook. But there is a bit of a secret. So there is an app called CrossOver which runs on Android and therefore runs on the Chromebook, right, and this app could CrossOver or let
you run Windows Apps within other platform's
architectures, right? So the whole, the whole
endeavor of this app is to run Windows Apps on Android and on tablets right? Now I haven't tested this but it's possible to
try running things like Adobe Suite via CrossOver
on the Chromebook. Now it's a bit of a fiddly
process to jump through all those hoops just to get stuff running on the Chromebook if you really, really,
really need to use InDesign. My personal answer to that question would be, Ben, delegate more and have other people doing that. You should be a CEO and not dicking around in InDesign yourself. But, but if you really wanna
run something like that, that's untested so far,
so it might be something that I get our lead team to test out, but my philosophy is don't try and shove a square peg into a round hole. Don't buy Chromebook and try and make it behave like a MAC or
try and make it behave like a Surface Pro or
like a Windows machine. Know what a Chromebook is great for which is, reasonable
cost, inside battery life, super secure, connected
to your Google account, everything in sync, it just works, right, and it does everything on the web and all of your Cloud-based Apps absolutely brilliantly and of course everything in the Google world absolutely brilliantly as well. Keep to that, and if you can keep to that, then you're gonna have a great
experience with Chromebooks. If you haven't bought one
yet for your business, just buy one, even buy
one of the cheap ones, spend 500 bucks, buy a super cheap one, jump on our store, itGenius.com and get started with one. I promise you every customer
who's tried just one has come back to us, and some have said, hey, this is amazing, I'm
never buying a PC again, I'm rolling this out to all of my staff, G'day, ma-tu-b thank you very much. Some have come back to us and said, yeah, it was good but
it only worked in xyz, certain circumstances,
or it only kinda worked as our shared device in the boardroom, and that's fine. But every business who's on G-Suite should have at least one Chromebook in the business and if
you haven't already, time to get one for yourself. So head along to itGenius.com, go to our store on the website and you can purchase one online or if you'd like some help from our team then go ahead and message our team help at itGenius.com or you
can just message this page or message our business page and our team will be
very happy to help out with some recommendations. Thanks for watching and thanks to viewers. Thanks for those of you who tuned in and said, hi. And if you have any
questions just message them to this page or pop them
below in the comments and I'll be very happy to answer them. Take care, cheers.
