For a complete numpty would the first laptop be just as safe as a chrome book or even our current iPad?
Your question is pretty vague but I’m going to say no.
Given that you say you want to use online banking, I’m assuming you are simply going to log onto bank websites and do stuff. This means that the transaction is between your *browser* and your bank’s website. Everything is encrypted between the browser and the website, so that’s always safe. Nothing is stored on your computer except if you click the ‘remember my login’ bit, and on a bank’s website that should only remember your user name. If the browser remembers your password that’s also encrypted but it is stored on the device – be that Mac, iPad, Windows or whatever.
However the information you send doesn’t start in the browser, it starts in your head and goes via your fingers to the keyboard into the computer’s memory, before the browser can encrypt it. So the only real risk is that malicious software is sitting on the device intercepting your keystrokes whilst you type stuff into the browser. These exist, and are called keyloggers.
Now as far as I know you have to have installed some dodgy software in order to have a keylogger. So something that say, promises to download free movies, so you click through the installer, so you are willingly installing the keylogger. This is called a Trojan Horse (I think) for obvious reasons.
Malware bytes should hopefully pick up stuff like this. Macs are susceptible to it in theory, but there are probably fewer trojans going around for Mac I don’t know.
The thing is though – on a Chromebook I think it’s pretty much impossible to even create a Trojan for it because you cannot install any software. You can only install browser plugins, which live in the browser and not on the computer itself. Therefore the keylogger concept couldn’t work.
In theory at least – as long as no-one’s made a mistake when writing the Chromebook software…