Dick Eastman has been talking about the use of Chromebooks (and cloud-based systems in general) in genealogy research for many years. In fact, if you mentioned the words “Chromebook” or “ChromeOS” or “the cloud” with “genealogy” to me, I would refer you to one of his blog posts because he is who I associate with that. He’s also talking about some of the changes that are coming down the pipeline for Google Photos as well as moving ChromeOS to the Android kernel.
What are Chromebooks?
They are a (mostly) low-cost line of laptops with touchscreens, but desktops, tablets, and all-in-one computers (think iMac) can also carry the label, as long as they have ChromeOS as their operating system (OS). Chromebooks have been around since 2011. The part about ChromeOS is the important thing, it’s what makes a Chromebook a Chromebook. ChromeOS is Google’s proprietary Linux-based system and it’s meant to run on lower-cost, lower-powered hardware (both in terms of screens, CPUs (usually older or low-powered), RAM (memory), and storage). If you’ve been using computers prior to the 2010s, you may remember the low-cost “netbooks” (network + notebooks) which ran Windows on very cheap 9 to 11-inch laptops (and usually ran it very poorly), and the “One Laptop Per Child” project (OLPC) which was meant to provide laptops to children. Chromebooks ultimately replaced the netbooks and OLPC, and ChromeOS was optimized to run well on these lower-powered machines.
Now there are “premium” Chromebooks that cost the same as Windows PCs and Macs, with specifications that approach the same as PCs and Macs (up to 16GB of RAM, 256GB or more of storage, larger displays), but most are oriented towards markets that favor less RAM and storage. Most cheap Chromebooks have 4GB of RAM (memory) and 32GB of storage (a quick look at Lenovo’s online store shows $160 USD will get you such a laptop). The storage is nothing to write home about – it’s usually a slower former of storage than what we are used to, but in theory you’re not storing data locally, it’s supposed to all be in the cloud.
The education market is the biggest market – for instance, my middle-schooler has a three year-old Chromebook that he uses at school, and it is a Lenovo Chromebook with an 11-inch display, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage, and that’s fairly common. If you see cheap laptops on Amazon, etc. for under $100 USD, they could easily be older Chromebooks (and there are few 11-inch full laptops or “ultraportable” PCs these days with a premium price).
Specifications
The specifications seem very light – many of us, especially genealogists, tend to have a minimum of 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage with a 13-inch or 14-inch display in our laptops, but Chromebooks are meant to almost always have internet connectivity/web access, and Linux (and Android) and web apps can be lightweight. For the most part, at the same price points, you’ll find very similar specifications, with maybe a difference in CPUs (but not that much of a difference).
A typical Chromebook has:
- 32GB or 64GB of storage (hard drive)
- A dual-core or quad-core CPU (low-power, can be Intel/x86 or ARM)
- 11-inch or 13-inch touchscreen display (11-inch is more common to me)
- 4GB of memory/RAM (although I’ve heard more are moving to 8Gb).
If you think about it, a lot of the kinds of things that you use 10-inch or 11-inch iPad or Android tablets for, you could do with a cheap Chromebook with web access – media consumption (YouTube), web browsing, and email. In fact many of us are using our iPads and Android tablets for “light” genealogy work, such as browsing an online genealogy service (Ancestry, MyHeritage, FindMyPast, etc.), email, website research, etc.
A Chromebook could easily make a decent “backup” mobile device , especially if you are a genealogist visiting a library with internet access, and you normally use a desktop at home. If you have the right apps (something for a future article), and everything you do at the library is saved to the cloud (Google Drive in this case), as soon as you are home, you can easily access that data from your home PC.
Eastman currently has a couple of articles up within the past week discussing Chromebooks and genealogy:
- Genealogy on a Chromebook with rootstrust
- What We’re Hoping to See at Google’s Chromebook Showcase
- Post-PC World Ancestral Record Keeping in Genealogy
The first is specifically about using rootstrust (link) on a Chromebook, and the second is about what people are hoping to see announced officially- faster CPUs, better battery life, and a few interesting features (such as a detachable keyboard). People are also looking for various updates to improve Google Photos – I know a lot of genealogists who use Google Photos as their media library or at least a backup of their photos.
Finally, there’s the move to shift to the Android kernel for ChromeOS. This is actually the move that’s most interesting to me – ChromeOS is already running under an Android framework (see this Google article) and has been for the better part of a decade. It’s been talked about since earlier this year, but work is progressing, and while the reasoning is for Google’s AI initiatives, it’s going to make it easier for those developers who want their apps running seamlessly under both Android and ChromeOS.
Java Genealogy Apps
Finally, I would like to mention two other genealogy apps besides rootstrust that should run just fine on ChromeOS (and Haiku OS as well, Haiku being what BeOS could have been):
I have seen Ancestris mentioned as having run under the Haiku OS, as well as on Chromebooks. I have not seen Ancestry Tree Manager run on Chromebooks, but these apps are Java-based, and if your Chromebooks (or other platforms – Haiku, maybe OS/2) are running mostly “modern” versions of Java, these are the full-featured genealogy databases that you are going to have access to when native-versions aren’t available, and they maybe the only full-featured genealogy database programs you are able to run locally..
As for Eastman’s last article about the “Post-PC World”….I don’t think we are quite in a Post-PC world just yet, but I understand what he is saying (and has been saying for years), and in theory, if you planned things out (your workflow, your storage, etc.), you could definitely live that life right now if you wanted to.
What do I think?
I’ve been asked in the past if a Chromebook would make a suitable genealogy platform, and my answer is..it depends. For reference, my current main laptop is an Apple M-series MacBook Air with 16 GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage, and I selected it (as I have with laptops in the past) with the idea that I maybe visiting a relative, and scanning a lot of photos, or I may want to have copies of a lot of photos (while editing) and other information (PDF files, etc.) and I also have a Windows 11 virtual machine on it (that takes up a few hundred GB). The virtualized Windows allows me to run any Windows-based genealogy software or scanning software that I may want to (as well as Microsoft Access). I know there are other solutions (Win, CrossOver), but a virtualized Windows runs extremely fast on Apple’s Silicon M-series CPUs these days.
Could I do it? I kind of already have. It’s not uncommon for me to not touch my laptop for a day or two at a time, and to be working with an older 11-inch iPad Pro (with a keyboard) and storing all of my data between Google Drive, OneDrive (Microsoft), DropBox, and my NAS (network-attached storage) depending on what I’m doing. I can only do this because of recent updates to iPadOS that make it easy to work with files, but the point is, I could easily swap out a Chromebook for my iPad. I can do plenty of genealogy research on it, and while I have family tree apps on my iPadOS (MobileFamilyTree) for the most part I use it more for genealogy research than family tree building.
The Future
As for the future, there are many millions of kids who are entering high school every year (and have been for a few years now) who are using Chromebooks as their daily driver. In fact, the COVID pandemic forced a lot of kids to switch to an iPad or Chromebook workflow for their schoolwork, and so they are extremely comfortable with the idea of cloud-based computing (in this case, Google Drive, Google’s office suite, etc.) and having their data stored off of whatever computing device they are using. It will change things going forward (and arguably already is, but I don’t think it will kill off PCs and Macs just yet.