Fantastic Friday Read: “Google’s Chrome OS Flex is now available for old PCs and Macs”
I tinkered with this a little bit in the office and it did indeed work as advertised and turned an old 11” MacBook Air into one of the nicest Chromebooks I have ever used. I would not use a 11” MacBook Air at this point for much of anything and its great that we could bring that machine back to life. I can see this being particular usefully for K-12 Education and is going to be a real threat to Microsoft’s Windows 11 SE efforts, which does require you to buy hardware and Windows 11 in general with its pretty steep hardware requirements that often lock out a lot of machines. At work we’re rolling out Windows 11 to machines that support it, but even for a college with a 3–4x year refresh cycle I do have some machines, particularly in classrooms or computer labs that do sit around a little bit longer that its simply not possible for me to install Windows 11 with any degree of official support. I think this could also be great for small businesses who are just getting started and want to live in the Google ecosystem with its simplied management for those organizations who cannot afford full-time IT support staff. Being able to pull an old laptop or desktop out of the closet and make it a functional computer for Google Apps and whatnot could be the savings that could be put forward to other parts of the business. I’m looking forward to seeing how this affects the personal computer market and if its going to have a Google Chrome like effect in time. Could there be a future that a certain group of people buy a laptop and use Windows 11 to download ChromeOS?
