Chromebook vs. iPad: Which is Best for Travel?
Next week my wife is headed off to Arizona on a 10-day trip. She’s plans to take her 15” MacBook Pro with her so she can stay connected with the “outside world,” so she borrowed a laptop roll-aboard bag from a friend.
As you read this story (which I wrote on my desktop computer before leaving home), I’m in Long Beach, California, 400-odd miles south of where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I’ve done what my wife plans to do: Taken a computer with me.
The iPad fits nicely on an airliner tray table and quickly connects to the Internet over WiFi hotspots in airports, hotels, coffee shops and nowadays, aboard commercial airliners.
I’ve got Apple’s “Pages” program which lets me edit documents created in Microsoft Word, or create new documents that can be saved in Word format.
I’ve got almost every program installed in the iPad that I would use on a bulkier, heavier, more expensive Apple or Windows laptop computer.
But would I be better off toting along a Google Chromebook when I travel?
Those lines could have been spoken by Clint Eastwood if he had starred in a movie filmed in a Western U.S national park, playing a character mashed up from his roles as the “Man with No Name” in “spaghetti Westerns” and as “Dirty” Harry Callahan, the San Francisco police inspector who frequently “blew away” crime suspects with a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum revolver.