[Shane R]

I bought my mom a Chromebook Pixel and everything is so much better now

We were off to the races. It's a month later and she loves the thing. It's not fighting her, or asking her to learn anything new, or foisting complicated new products on her. There are no apps to update, and no new versions of the OS to install every year. It's just Chrome, doing its thing. And because it's still a thousand-dollar laptop, it's incredibly fast.

So now my mom has a computer that doesn't ever ask her to update software or try to kick her into other apps (and other user interface patterns) and away from the web. She has access to all of her Google accounts (of course) and she has access to all of her Apple stuff in a way that actually tracks much more closely to her experience on iOS.

The thousand dollars I spent on a Pixel didn't buy my mom crazy extensibility, or the ability to run powerful apps like Photoshop or Excel. It didn't even buy her that much storage. But it did buy her a beautiful, well-designed product. And most importantly, it bought her focus, and the ability to spend her time using her computer instead of trying to learn how to use it.

That's a lesson I think Steve Jobs would have liked very much.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/1/108...the-divergence