Jonathan Fine

North American schools will, in 2015, buy 3.6 million chromebooks, out of global sales of 7.3 million (and 8 million predicted for 2016). In this market they are outselling iPads and will soon challenge Microsoft. Perhaps Europe will follow.

This talk will give a social, economic and technical survey of chromebooks, looking ahead to the next five years. A major problem is using chromebooks as a platform for learning Python. This is because, like iPhones, they are locked down (except that they support a 'developer mode' that allows your own version of Linux to be run as a guest operating system).

This year I replaced my laptop with a chromebook.