Having worked with thousands of businesses using Google Workspace tools, we are often asked if ChromeOS is suitable for a work computer, so here's what I have to say… a few years ago, I decided to return my Macbook Pro for a Chromebook as a primary computer and never looked back. Find out why.
It's now easier to do everything on the web and work on the go, without worries that something happens to my device. Do you think it's also time to ditch your old computer?
If you find this video helpful, let us know. Drop a comment below!
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
Hi, my name is Peter Moriarty. And five years ago, I gave up my beloved Mac and switch to Chrome OS. I'm going to share a little bit about my journey. And some of the reasons I've stuck around with Chrome. Now, if you're a business owner, it's a good idea to consider Chrome OS for your business. And if you're a consumer, then Chrome OS is also gaining popularity in the consumer world as well. Chrome devices are amazingly deeply integrated into the Google ecosystem. They work fast, they've got low cost there, they've got amazing battery life. And chrome in general is on the rise. So today, we're going to talk about Chrome OS, Windows and Mac, I've got a few different segments here to kind of take you guys through the different stages and the different options of these, I'm going to be sharing with you my experience, having worked with Chrome for a number of years as my primary operating system, and also take you guys through like, you know what some other options are, you've got windows, you've got Mac machines. And so for me, my priority here is to basically take you guys through what options are available, and help you make an informed decision about which operating system is right for you.
Our mission is to help small and medium sized business owners play a big game. And what we mean by that is, we want to make sure that you have a technology led business we want the strategy in your business, to be all about tech are all about tech. But let's say the right technology strategy to help you grow a successful business. And we've helped literally 1000s of small businesses in Australia and all over the world. And we've got hundreds of five star reviews on our Google page, you can go and check that out if you Google it genius. And you'll learn all about us from there. Now we've grown and scaled our team, we've got quite a substantial team here in the Philippines, not here in the Philippines, I'm in Australia, but the team have primarily in the Philippines. And we've been able to grow a completely remote company. And we also share the secrets of how we have grown and scaled our own organization to our customers. And so if you become a customer of ours, then you actually get access to videos and trainings on how we've grown our business using technology strategy. Pretty cool, huh? Now, one thing that we rely on is called the growth roadmap. And this is what we use for all of our businesses as we guide them through growth and guide them through technology strategy, our growth roadmap, and you'll see playlists on our YouTube channel. Depending on what stage of business you are asked, I will direct you to what technology you should be focusing on implementing in your business. If you're a growth stage business, and you've got five or 10, or 15 employees, you probably want to be thinking about like a CRM system to manage your sales team. If you're a startup business, you want to make sure that you have your task management handled properly. So you can delegate more things and get more done with your team. If you're a scale business, and you're in the stage of having more than 20 employees, well, then you're probably gonna be focusing on things like KPIs. And so at that stage, you probably want to be thinking about things like building a company dashboard for all of your KPIs. Now, these are all things that we can either help with ourselves as a consulting business, or we can refer you on to a partner as well. But let's get into the topic.
So I've spent five years using Chrome OS as my primary machine. And I want to take you guys through why I've done this, why this is important. And for me, you know why Chrome OS has become such an important part of my business. Now, I didn't start out this way. I started out as a Mac guy. And as a Mac guy, I was basically, you know, out there, you know, you can see this is literally one of my first Mac's I think this is from about 12 years ago, I was out there repairing people's computers, and I knew that Mac's were more stable computers. So I always kind of defaulted to using or always defaulted to using max. And then over time, I eventually switched over to Google Chrome. And so if you're a business owner, and you're you know, you're curious about well, you know, why might I choose? Why am I choose using Google Chrome over say something like, why don't I use Google Chrome over say something like Windows?
Well, you may choose Chrome for a number of reasons. But primarily Chrome is to reduce it headaches. And this is something that I intrinsically know, as an IT person. But for someone else, who's you know, a business owner, who most of our audience are. Chrome is just kind of seen as sometimes like a little bit of a weird side thing, right? So if, if right now, you're a business owner, and you're rolling out Windows machines, or you're rolling out Mac machines to your business, consider Chrome, because it's going to dramatically reduce your costs. And also, they're just much more secure devices. I'm going to take you through, you know, some of the reasons why I've decided to switch to Chrome OS for myself as a business owner. And now why our team also use Chrome devices as well. Now, I actually gave up on Mac and I gave up on Windows machines completely. And I'm going to share a little bit about my story and why that is.
So now, the number one reason you'd consider Chrome is that it's deeply integrated with Google workspace. And what that means is if you're a business owner, and you're already using Google Drive, and Google Docs and and everything else that's available there for you in the Google ecosystem, Chrome is going to basically slip really nicely into all of those applications. And that's because there's deep integration with things like Google Drive. From there, you've got things like from there, you've got Things like your Google documents. And basically everything talks together in one system, which makes it nice and nice and easy to have everything talking together in the same place. Now, if you are using a Chromebook, you literally just sign in with your account, you just sign in with your Google account. And from the Google account, you're basically going to be from the Google account, you're basically going to be logging in with your, all of your bookmarks, all of your other stuff synchronized down to your local machine. And so from there, that means that with one login, you get access to your Chromebook, and it's completely secured a lock down to your Google account.
So the other thing I like about using a Google login for my Chromebook is that I can basically have a pretty decent work life balance. So I can have one profile set up for my personal stuff, and one profile setup for my business stuff. And basically, at the end of the day, I log out of my business profile, I log into my personal profile, and it's well do you know online shopping and, and other bits and pieces that I do on my machine that I don't want to have mixed up with my, with my work profile.
So some of the things that I love about Chrome OS, and some of the things that really makes Chrome OS special is number one, fast boot times chrome launches pretty much instantly. And that's because it's such a lightweight operating system, it doesn't have all of the junk that you need to load up into memory, when you actually switch the machine on. One of the other things that's great about it is it automatically updates. And so basically, you're automatically having updates applied in the background. And what chrome does is something really clever, where it has two copies of your operating system, it updates one while the computer still running. And then to install the update, it's not really installing the update, you just reboot the computer. And it boots to the second operating system, which has already been updated and verified. And so there's no waiting around for updates to install. I know that every time a Mac computer that I own gets updated, it takes about half an hour to an hour for a new operating system to be installed. And then you've got Windows machines, which can take hours or even days to do their updates. Whereas Google basically are constantly updating chrome every four to six weeks, there's a major release. And so there's just always have lots and lots of mini releases that don't get in the way of your productivity.
Next up, they have amazingly small form factors for Chrome boxes, and Chromebooks. So you know, pretty much standard laptop sizes. Now, a chrome box is something that runs just like a desktop version of Chrome OS. And we've got other videos on Chrome boxes. And these, as you can see, can be clipped onto the back of the monitor, or just sit on a desk, and, and really not take up much space at all. And I really, really love these because chrome boxes are just the best device to have on a desktop. They're powerful, they're fast, and they have all the other advantages of Chrome. And you can bring your own keyboard and mouse and use them as you do a full computer. Next up, one of my favorite advantages of Chrome is that most of the laptop style form devices are touchscreen. And that's pretty much all of them on the range at the moment, because that's one of the best features of Chrome. So whether you're using apps in the Chrome Web Store, or you're using an app from the Google Play Store, like running Android apps on a Chrome OS device, or you can actually use your fingers and with that, you will never go back to a non touchscreen device. Now I think it's pretty weird that Apple haven't put touchscreens on their Mac laptops just yet, I think they're well behind. Because now having used a pixel book for over five years, I would just never go back to a non touchscreen device. And lastly, you can see here, this is the picture of the desktop of Chrome OS, if you haven't seen it before, this is what it looks like. Basically, they just work. Remember, the old days when Mac's used to just work? Well, Mac's got too much market share. And I think too much complication in the way that they develop the apps. And every now and again, I get a crash on my Mac. Now it's still 10 times more stable than a Windows machine is to me, at least. But Chrome is another level of stability, because it's literally running a Linux installation. And over that Linux installation is chromium, the version of Chrome that then gets delivered and packaged as Chrome OS by Google.
So a couple of things that I miss on Chrome OS, some of the things that are not quite there and are a little bit different. Number one is heavy media editing. And now from time to time, I do a little bit of video editing. Most of the time these days, I actually send that off to my team to do instead of me doing myself, but I used to enjoy editing things like family videos, and I would use either iMovie or Final Cut Pro for that. Multimedia work. Like you know heavy photo editing and Photoshop or Lightroom just doesn't exist on the Chromebook right now. There are some rudimentary video editing software platforms and applications that are available, although they're not really mature just yet, and I haven't personally found anything that I liked. So heavy media editing is out right now on Chrome OS. Apart from that, there's online tools and applications like Canva and there's another one called way video, which will actually allow you to do online video editing. However, those are not fantastic in my experience for fully fledged video production. So you're looking to work with a different device.
Next up is gaming. While there are gaming options that are coming to Chromebooks, not yet available in Australia, but Google stadia is a gaming streaming service, which is available. And that actually allows you to stream games from the internet down to your Chrome device or to your mobile phone. That's a great start. But they haven't really mature just yet, the full suite of let's say hardcore or more mature games are more likely to need to run on Windows, and you'll need something like a Steam account. Now, that's not to say that they're not on their way, steam has actually announced that they are building a Linux store, which is very likely to come across onto Chrome devices. And there is actually windows support for Chrome devices just been launched by parallels for corporate customers only right now. And so what's this space with gaming on Chrome devices, because it is fast maturing. Now, the last one that I missed is storage. Even though my Chromebook on the pixel book has a pretty decent 256 gigabytes of storage. That's about the biggest storage I've seen on a Chromebook. And that's because the idea is that you're going to do most of your work online in the Google world. And therefore, Google and the other manufacturers don't really think you need that much storage on the device. And that's fairly true. But I do find myself from time to time, if I'm out and about and recording a lot of footage, and I'm saving backups of that video footage to my Chromebook. Before I get back to an internet connection where I can plug in and have them all upload, I do find that from time to time, I have to start juggling files, because my hard drive is finishing is kind of filling up. Now, it's not a massive issue. But it does happen from time to time.
So if you're curious about Chrome enterprise, then drop us a message and our team will be able to help with that. Chrome enterprise is great for business owners and business users who are utilizing Chromebooks and Chrome devices in their in their organizations. And it gives you an additional set of policies that you can apply to Chrome devices when they're under a Google workspace account. And so if you want to, for example, change the background picture of everyone's computer, if you want to lock down computers, so they can only be accessed by users within your company. So lock it down to your Google workspace domain. There's those policies as well as literally hundreds of other policies that you can configure for the devices. And what chrome enterprise does is it kind of replaces what we used to do in the old days of IT Service Management with a Windows Server and something called Active Directory. And Active Directory was a way of pushing down policies like printers and settings and changing whether or not someone could, you know, change their time for themselves on the local desktop. And you would have a local infrastructure server that would sit in an office and actually manage all of those local computers. Well, now in the cloud age, we don't need to have those local servers sitting there anymore in the office. And chrome enterprise allows you to effectively license each one of the business assets that you own. That's running Chrome OS, whether it's a Chromebook, or a chrome box, or another Chrome device, as there's a few others as well, and then apply policies to each one of those devices. So if you've got more than one or two Chrome devices, it's really a good idea to consider chrome enterprise, because it gives you a multitude more options. Chrome enterprise will also let you do things like connect a Chrome device to a Windows network. And so you can actually connect Chromebooks to an Active Directory network. If you're a large organization, and you have an Active Directory set up at the moment, you're still going to use that as your primary authentication, within Chrome devices can actually log in with Windows credentials, which is pretty cool. And so Google's made some amazing developments here. And if you're interested in that, then have a chat to the team.
If you're a business owner, and you've not yet been taken through our growth roadmap, then you may be interested in a free consultation with our team. If you qualify, our team will take you through the growth roadmap and see where the gaps are if there's any way where you might need help on your business journey with your technology strategy. Now, if you are an existing Google workspace user for your business, we have an amazing transfer in offer, where you basically get access to a google classroom with professional training for you and your team to use Google Classroom to the best of its ability. We envisage this to be part of your HR onboarding process. So when you hire a new employee, you put them in a classroom, and they go and receive a certificate once they've completed the class, and the quizzes. So you know, they know how to use Google workspace. And so in here, each lesson has module by module, an easy way for everyone to get through the different stages of learning all about workspace, and that makes you sure that your team have all of the skills and all of the competency required to be productive in your business. Now, to get access to the transferring offer, not only do you get access to the classroom, get free limited access to our support team, you get a free check of your DNS records just to make sure that you've set up all of the records correctly in your workspace account. Sometimes people miss the SPF or DKM or demark Records and emails can end up in spam and that kind of thing. So we just do a little check there. And then finally, if there's ever an issue there, then you actually have emergency access from our team. We have backup access to your account. If you're interested in that offer head along itgenius.com/transfer and get access to that. Thanks for being here guys. And we will catch in the next one if you have questions drop below and we will see you soon. Cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
