Here’s some unhelpful back-to-school advice: Don’t buy a laptop. Borrow one, steal one from a family member, buy a piece of junk for 40 bucks on Craigslist. If you can find a way to wait a couple of months before dropping serious coin on a new clamshell, you’ll be glad you did.
Later this fall, Apple’s almost certainly going to release a new MacBook Pro, which is desperately in need of a revamp. And there will be Windows PCs practically falling from the ceiling—maybe even a few made by Microsoft itself. But the real reason to hold off on your purchase is to wait for the new breed of Chromebooks that are on their way.
Right now, there are lots of good Chromebooks—stupidly cheap ones, ridiculously expensive ones, wonderfully in-between ones—but they’re pretty much all straightforward laptops. Later this year, though, right around the time you figure out your professors’ grading schemes, the Google Play Store is coming to Chrome OS. That means millions of Android apps on your Chromebook, which is going to change Chromebooks completely. Touchscreens will be more important; new sensors and processors will probably be integrated. You know those detachable, hybrid laptop-tablet things? They’re going to make a lot of sense.
So again: if you can wait, wait. If you absolutely need something right now, there’s still good news. As long as you buy a recent Chromebook, it’ll support the Android app integration when it launches. You just won’t get the full app-y experience if you’re using an HP Chromebook 13, for instance—it’s a great laptop but not really designed for anything else. You can get a more versatile device from Asus, however, and the Chromebook Pixel at least has a touchscreen.
Regardless of your timeframe, you should seriously consider buying a Chromebook for this school year. ChromeOS is secure and simple, and it’s set up so that if you do lose or break your device—it happens—you can get a new one and have all your settings and data restored in a few minutes. Chromebooks tend to have great battery life, since they don’t require much power. They’re usually pretty portable, too. Unless you’re using some super-specialized software, a Chromebook is plenty of computer for reading Wikipedia and writing your papers.
Part of what’s great about ChromeOS is how little setup it requires. You just log in. There are some places you can tweak and fiddle, and the Chrome Web Store is full of extensions and apps that will make your life easier—as long as you know where to look.
First, the apps. Go get Plex so you can play all the weird files your friends send you because it’s not illegal if someone else torrented it. (And get JSTorrent if you’re the downloading type.) Use LastPass or 1Password to keep all your logins in order. Line and Google Hangouts both have great Chrome apps, and Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp at least have decent web apps. Evernote’s great for taking notes, or you can download New Tab Draft and have a notepad every time you open a new tab. Word and Excel both work great in Chrome, as do Google Docs and Sheets—they’ll even work offline. There are great apps for learning math, reviewing flashcards, and reading textbooks. You get the idea, right? Almost everything you need is right there in a tab. Soon, there’ll be an Android app for that too.
There are also a few tweaks that make Chromebook life a little easier. If you’re an Android user most things are already pretty easy, since it’s Google. But if you install Pushbullet, you can move links, files, and photos from device to device. OneTab will save you whenever you find yourself with so many tabs open they’re all just tiny slivers. Put your favorite apps or sites in the dock at the bottom of the screen, and right-click on their icons to make them open in their own windows. And definitely enable “OK Google,” so you can start a search just by yelling from across the room.
The biggest change you’ll have to make when you get a Chromebook is all in your head. If you’ve used a Mac or Windows PC before, you open up a ChromeOS device and it just feels like it’s not as powerful or feature-rich. And it’s not! But that’s the beauty of it. A Chromebook’s exactly what most people need—a browser—and nothing more. That’s true right now. Once Android comes around, you’ll also have access to the biggest ecosystem of apps any laptop has ever seen. That might start to blow up the whole notion of a “laptop.” If you can wait to see what happens, how weird it really gets, I bet it’ll be worth it.