Chrome OS: the new mainframe

It's funny how a thing you've never really thought about can change the way you see a lot of things when you do.

Let's talk about the cloud. 

I'm not much of a cloud user. However, something has happened which is making me think about the way I manage my files. That's making me think about what I might eventually buy to replace my 2012 MacBook.

Up until now, a new computer would probably have been another Mac, although I'm not happy about the way that most new Macs can no longer be upgraded or even easily fixed when things go wrong. But given a choice of PC or Mac, I'll choose Macs. Generally.

Last Christmas, though, on impulse I bought a small Chromebook at the John Lewis Christmas sale. It's nothing special: a basic, blue, Asus C201P with an 11.6" screen, the usual 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, etc, etc. Very standard Chromebook. Lightweight and cheap.

You probably know enough about Chromebooks. They run ChromeOS which uses Google's Chrome browser and depends heavily on cloud-based storage, either on Google Drive or elsewhere. Chromebooks are effectively terminals into the great cloud-based mainframe of apps and data that's grown up around us.

Despite my long attachment to Mac hardware and locally installed apps like iTunes, Photos, iMovie, Pages, Numbers, MS Office and others, I've really taken to ChromeOS and this little laptop. It's simple and it's been bulletproof. It just works. And it's made me reconsider my whole locally-installed apps and data storage ecosystem.

Could I just move everything to the cloud?

It turns out that I have three kinds of data. Some of this data is cloud-friendly; some isn't.

1. Personal information and data: email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes (on iPhone Notes). This is already accessible via the cloud. Mostly it's in iCloud. And much of it is generated on my iPhone. 
2. Documents and spreadsheets - created locally on Word, Pages, Excel, Numbers and a small few created online on Google Drive, Office365 and Simplenote (which I also use on the iPhone). This could all go in the cloud and some is there already. I use Dropbox for storing documents, mostly as a way to write something on one machine and pick it up on another. Some of the documents go back years - I still have files in Apple Works format. There might even be some files in WordStar format. With Dropbox, though, you still have local files. 
3. And then there's "multimedia", which comprises photos, family videos, books and music. Some of the photos are scans of 35mm or medium format prints. Most of the music is on CD. The books are on Kindle. The videos are all family video shot on various camcorders, digital cameras, phones. 

I could upload categories one and two to the cloud very easily. Much of it is already there. The problem is the third type of content.

Music first. I tend to play music on my iPhone, sometimes from iTunes on my MacBook and occasionally on a stereo. I still have a lot of CDs. I'll need a way to transfer music from my CDs to my phone and computer for the foreseeable future. My MacBook can do that. A MacMini just for home use could also do that. An old Mac could work as a music jukebox. A G3 could do that. The Chromebook can't. You're probably saying Spotify and iTunes Music and so on. I don't need Spotify to give me what I already own, although it's a great app and I use it occasionally. And I don't trust the iTunes Store. I've bought music there and it doesn't show up everywhere. CDs are real and they're platform independent. They are compatible with iTunes, Windows Media Player, Linux, the stereo in the kitchen. You can also play them on any computer with a CD drive and speakers (that excludes Chromebooks, by the way, even on external drives). Once you've bought CDs, you own them. Think what you like; CDs work for me. :-)

Photos/video: this is probably the sticking point. I'm deeply uncomfortable about putting family and personal photos of my life online and my wife is just as uncomfortable. I've photos going back years. Before I was married. Childhood photos. Photos from my twenties.  Grandparents' photos. I've thousands of photos and while about half of them are rubbish, some I really don't want to lose.

DVDs. I have some. Not a lot. I've the same reservations about iTunes (will it always remember what I've bought?).

If my obsession with backups sounds odd, consider that I've had a major house fire in my life and I lost a decade's worth of photos from the 1990s as well as everything else I owned. Never again. So where do I put photos and family videos for safety? And that's before I start editing photos, tweaking them and sometimes publishing to Flickr.

Add that to the fact that much of my photography is from cameras, not the phone. I scan old stuff occasionally. That might change, but it's also an issue.

Once I set music and photos/video aside, though, the Chromebook can access everything else on the cloud: email, contacts, calendar, docs, notes, etc.

So my next Mac might be a MacMini that's mostly for photo/video editing, (category 3) with a Chromebook for writing stuff (category 2) when I'm out and about or sitting in bed.

The Mac's key selling point is becoming its media editing ability. Everything else I do, though, can be done on any hardware using web apps. And if it can be done on any hardware, why do I still need a Mac? Only data category 3 is really keeping me here now.

And I didn't see that coming.