
Simple. by loading win7 JL are ensuring that no-one will be able to get a pricematch since there will be no other shops selling the same spec!
Careful, web designers: always check a gadget's specs before you tinker with images of the product. A salutary example of when they don't is provided by John Lewis. The Middle Classes' favourite retailer is offering Samsung's £379 Chromebook - key feature: it runs Google's cloud-centric Chrome OS - seemingly with Windows 7, if …
example of how chromebooks haven't taken off is the "chromebook" section of the local PCWorld here ... have a dedicated section with a dozen or so chromebook ready for people to try out and a couple of staff with "chromebook" t-shirts ready to help people ... except they are always slumped in chairs looking very bored hoping that one day someone will walk up to a chromebook and they can then help them try it out! 10m away there's a similar setup for iPads ... that's always crowded.
No, what "did it in" was Microsoft twisting the OEMs' arms to kill off Linux netbooks. They were selling quite nicely until Microsoft stepped in and forced them to lard up the specs until they could (badly) run Windows XP.
I'm not excited about Chromebooks for a different reason: I think devices like the Asus Transformer show that what consumers really want is Android laptops.
"I think devices like the Asus Transformer show that what consumers really want is Android laptops."
I think the sales figures suggest otherwise.
I'm not saying that you're wrong in your assertion that consumers really want Android laptops, but reported sales figures of 82k aren't very good evidence. .
Why Google are trying to sell these to home users is beyond me. They're a frontend for google Docs. Google Docs is an extremely good platform for collaborative team based working (many users same doc same time and can see each others' changes as they happen, no worry about save / restore as all changes can be rolled back to the Nth degree) Very good for cross-company working. Trouble is it is very much all or nothing so to get the best you got to move your filetores to the cloud and take away a lot of the safety blankets IT depts are used to. And MS Office. Also performance can be choppy on big docs. Horses for courses - for certain types of worker I reckon they're a good thing, and not endlessly supporting the trench-war against user-installed crapware is thin-clientesque refreshing.
Precisely. Put in a nice screen, ssd, battery and retail costs and the CPU counts for very little, especially when it turns out the CPU is rather feeble.
MBAs might be expensive, but not if you have to buy a laptop and a tablet.
High-power x86 laptop with android tablet in the (detachable) screen would be the winner for me. Being able to use the "base" as a wifi access point would be handy too. My wireless router doesn't reach through all the walls of my house.
With the high price and the limited availability of chomebooks (and now chromeboxes) it seems little wonder that people are choosing tablets and laptops over these.
Chromebooks/boxes aren't yet available here in Australia so I can't comment on the quality of the product, however the only person I know who has bought one loves it. I have an Asus Transformer TF101 which would be my ideal machine if the keyboard wasn't utter crap and it didn't use a proprietary power connector.
It strikes me that in most of the above comments you could replace 'ChromeOS' with 'WP7' and they could be from a thread talking about phones.
Underpowered hardware, efficient OS. All very nice but no one is buying.
Perhaps Google need to find a once dominant laptop manufacturer with great design capabilities and plummeting market share...
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