$149 Chromebooks (opens in new tab)

I was going to post this if somebody else didn't. To add one important detail: the HP Stream you linked doesn't just exist as a proof of concept or whatever, which would be one thing, but it's currently outselling all the Chromebooks (and every other laptop for that matter) on Amazon.

Chromebooks dominated in 2014, but they've been bumped and I'm not sure they'll ever be back at the top. Rather than a sea change, it looks like Google was just ahead of its competitors for a year, and now that year has come and gone.

For those interested, here is a review

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8784/hp-stream-11-review-a-new...

tl;dr: "...if you have been wanting a Chromebook running Windows, be sure to check out the HP Stream."

A bit more expensive

http://www.costco.com/ASUS-T100TAR-Transformer-Book-2-in-1-T...

detachable Touchscreen tablet, quad core, 2GB RAM, 32GB Storage

Is it possible to install Linux on the HP Stream ?

I doubt the battery life is any longer than the ARM based competition. "Better" depends on what value you put on which feature. For me, I wouldn't use a Chromebook because Emacs needs Alt and Super keys.

I've also seen this system in my search, but it doesn't meet the criteria:

1) This system is listed at $199, not $149.

2) In the questions at the bottom, users do not recommend this as a Minecraft or gaming system.

the first hit is always free

> Microsoft isn't as good at collecting and reselling all of your personal information, so have to charge the actual cost of the hardware.

Google does not sell your personal information in any way. They use it for their own advertising purposes, but they don't sell it to anyone, in any form.

Microsoft is as good at collecting personal information as anybody. Collecting information isn't hard. They're just not very good at making that information useful to the people who provide that information or to themselves, via advertising or otherwise.

These devices are made by other companies not Google. How do they profit from advertisement. Are you implying that Google pays these companies when they sell their own devices with Google software in it?

Shilling for Microsoft huh? What makes you think that Google sells your personal info?

I doubt you're paying for the "free" software -- it's all loss-leaders. If anything it may be reducing the cost of the device.

We're doing a similar thing but with a Raspberry Pi that I've stripped down so it runs nothing but a plain text editor. It's just what we had lying around when the issue came to a head. There was the temptation of the Web, but even the fonts and settings of a regular word processor were too distracting. He's happy with the solution. It's a little bit geeky and weird, which is an attraction for him.

Very true, those HP Stream devices look competitive compared to these Chromebooks.

What does that have to do with anything. Minecraft runs on ARM.

Have you done this? If so, what JRE are you using for Minecraft? I know that trying to run Android Studio with the OpenJDK JRE on hardware with a similar clock speed, is pret-ty slow even when that hardware is x86. I can't imagine what it would be like on ARM.

Microsoft ate IBM and others from the bottom, because the margins were too low on PC vs mainframe and minis. And now, you're suggesting Microsoft should accept being eaten from the bottom because the margins are too low (I guess that's what you're arguing). Classic innovator's dilemma scenario.

Those who don't learn from history will repeat it. Even those who made the history in question.

I agree. Microsoft should ignore this because there's no money in it. Still, it's nice that a couple billion new people will be able to afford their first computer.

Well, just this week a purchased a HP Stream 7 Signature edition for £50 (~=$50). Microsoft is definitely in the market.

I have a few $300 Windows 8.1 machines and although they might have objectively better hardware, my Chromebook is nicer to work with. It feels a lot less flaky than some of the Asus and Acer $300-350 machines with Windows imho.

>Chrome should run significantly better on Chrome OS than it does on Windows or IE does on Windows for that matter.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. In my machine IE and Firefox beats Chrome performance almost in everything. And I have seen ~$100 tablets running Windows 8.1 and the performance is far from crappy.

I've got a $100 tablet and $30 bluetooth keyboard running windows. This means that I have a small form factor machine that I can develop on, and with a usb otg cord, I can connect to near anything I want. Finally, it comes with a real bios, so I can install whatever operating system I want on it, without doing silly things like removing screws.

It's sad to see folks celebrating computing devices that are more extremely locked down than even the iDevices. A Windows PC/laptop is much more open than a Chromebook.

Can Mozilla even make a Firefox browser for ChromeOS? Only Google can make system and native apps, unlike the iDevices where you can access most of the native functionality even if you have to go through Apple's approval and you're not forced to upload all your information into Google's cloud with paltry local storage like 64GB on even a 1500 dollar machine where the information is mined by Google and is accessible to various parties like the Government. They now even track which retail stores people visit using their Android phones or iPhones. http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/

Looks like user and developer freedom are a big concern only when Apple or Microsoft infringe it(even though Win32 is much more open than ChromeOS, after all Google exploited it with the Chrome browser and bundling it with Flash and Java updates), but Google gets a free pass to lock everything down and still call itself open.

> If you can get a laptop/tablet that can do the same thing that this Chromebook does

That's not remotely true.

When my grandparents and parents ask me what computer they should get, or my in-laws ask what they should get their kids, I'm going to seriously consider Chromebooks. If they need to run Office, or Minecraft, clearly it's not a fit. But for the tweeting / facebooking / gmailing universe, a Chromebook is a very nice box.

And the number of zero-day exploits, viruses, keyboard loggers is way smaller for a Chrome OS machine. And the update process is a painless reboot. And I'm not helping them try to read data off of a dead hard drive (because it's in the cloud.) And if they want a second or a third, all of their data is visible on all of them. And the battery is great, the wifi works great, the build quality is great. Get them hooked up with two-factor protection, and their accounts and data are pretty well protected.

You're viewing the Chrome OS machines and their competitors, from a tech-savvy super-user standpoint. Many people don't need, don't want, and are hindered by that flexibility and power.

The maintenance cost on a "full OS" is higher than the maintenance cost on a Chrome OS. Period.

Chromebook sales are constantly rising.

With the eventual capability that they'll be able to run Android programs, as well as PNaCl and Emscripten borrowing from each other and getting better offering opportunity for tons of apps to be ported to the web, and then of course HTML5 and Js becoming the technology of choice for all sorts of apps, Chromebooks are the eventual future.

Maybe they're not the present, but they ARE the future.

And this is the main thing - for millions (hundreds of millions, maybe billions soon), a smartphone is their first entry to the internet. Probably an Android. When they see the Chrome logo in a laptop they can afford, and they already like the Android/Chrome ecosystem, they'll buy it, versus Windows which is associated with viruses, scams, piracy, etc...

Keep in mind Googles current business is still search. The net they're casting has nothing to do with the present, they're gunning for 7 billion people to associate them with computing, and to create the new future of computing.

Go to the third world. Yes some families have cheap PCs running pirated XP, but every kid has a cheap smartphone that they can connect to the internet with. They all have Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc...

I just bought a Chromebook for my parents-in-law, even though there were slightly cheaper Windows laptops. The reason? I'm off the hook for support. No malware issues, no backups, no nothing - worst case the thing lets out the magic smoke, you buy a new one and log in again.

And that's why the education sector is flocking to these things. OK, the price is good, but when you factor in order of magnitude less support costs, it's a very compelling proposition.

> If you can get a laptop/tablet that can do the same thing that this Chromebook does and has a full OS for a few bucks more, would you do it?

Are there really any sub-200$ Windows laptops that have 10 hour battery life on an 8 second boot?

I find that pretty hard to believe. Maybe they have similarly specced components but the experience will be much worse.

For my mom/grandmother/dad... They're all using chromebooks... not for the reduced cost, but because the environment is more secure, and fits their needs.

So the answer is maybe.

I don't think having a "full OS" factors very much into the decision process for someone considering this kind of device.

No, it isn't just about the cost.

If I had a choice between a £150 Chromebook and a £75 Windows laptop, I'd choose the Chromebook.

Windows isn't an 'upgrade' to Chrome OS.

exactly. in the US they also launched with the mobile association. leading them to be mostly ignored by everyone.

the only time i heard about chromebooks in the wild was while walking at low income are shopping malls. the Cricket and att stores would often have a little banner on the floor advertising the "cheap kinda of a computer!"

The middle class in first world countries, maybe. Try spending some time in the developing world. Lower cost of living means that "middle income" families can live comfortably on less income. But the costs of large capital goods, e.g. computers and cars, is not lower.

Imagine your average laptop cost $5k - $15k. Would you consider it a big deal if you could get a decent <$1k laptop? That's the equivalent situation.

An awful lot of people pluck down premium-level bucks for iOS, which is even more neutered than ChromeOS. Consumers have spoken, they do not care.

Really, we're in a day and age where most people can do their daily activities on the web.

The usual "word processing, research, facebook" student load, for instance? A dedicated physical machine powerful enough to run even MS Word locally is a waste of money in this instance.

Access to the global information network and ability to use things on it is step 0 in getting people into the modern era. All that other stuff that you get from a "real OS" is a step above that.

Don't bother, this thread is totally astroturfed by paid googlers. What you can read here is just insane. I can't believe HN is alllowing this. This product is crap,but boy they are selling it hard here.

I've never had a chromebook. How bad is it? What if I just want to browse the web and watch hulu, netflix, and youtube?

Yes, it makes me wonder how many people buy a Chromebook and state "never again!". It's like being given an etchasketch as a computer to do "real" work on but with the iron filings only accessible when with a tethering plan.

With all the talk of schools mandating that children have equivalent devices, what was wrong with writing on paper and doing maths on paper? We managed at school.

Wow. AC wireless in a $100 device. Now I'm interested.

What does it do for power? Through the USB port like most other similar devices I'm assuming?

> The Raspberry Pi is a nearly stick-like mini computer that can run Windows or Linux.

What? Is this about the future version of Windows that will run on ARM?

Amusing that it has a more useful port than the new Macbook.

Actually, according to CNET, there's a Linux version of the Intel stick that costs only $89, plus, Intel's has a micro SD card slot, although it lacks the 802.11ac.

http://www.cnet.com/products/intel-compute-stick/

I'm pretty sure it'll be good at that :)

For dashboards and kiosks, there might be of use:

https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/3134673?hl=en

http://googleforwork.blogspot.com/2015/03/screens-go-Google-...

That's exactly why I was considering buying a raspberry pi for. Have you also considered the chromecast for this (maybe by creating a custom app/plugin for your dashboard)?

Not necessarily.

I do virtually all my work split between my home office and an actual workplace office. Currently I drag a laptop back and forth between the two, but having a monitor/keyboard/mouse at both (which I already do and dock the laptop into) and just bringing a small stick literally in my pocket that I can plug in to either place and get my full, familiar, always-up-to-date development environment is very appealing.

Obviously YMMV depending upon use case, for me a full laptop (even a small one) is overkill for what I need for a work machine, since I never really use it anyplace other than work or home and in both places I plug it into "full-sized" keyboard/mouse/monitors anyway.

Since I do Android development, ChromeOS isn't the ideal platform for this, but I suspect these sticks will run crouton like other ChromeOS devices...

Organizationally-managed Chromeb.*s can be remotely disabled by the administrator.

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/3523633

Glue.

Where d you even get a monitor that doesn't do HDMI any more?

> ChromeOS fundamentally expects internet access

ChromeOS devices are less "surprising" in this sense, if you think of them not as computers per se, but as (the fat-client equivalent to) thin client appliances that boot into a Citrix session connected to a machine-instance running within the Google cloud.

It's not a perfect analogy—you can use [some carefully-written apps on] the device without internet access once you've set it up, and so forth—but thinking in those terms lets you predict what ChromeOS will tend to do in a given situation quite well.

How to open the Pixel 2015: remove the two glued-on rubber strips on the bottom, remove the 15-or-so screws below them, remove the bottom plate.

Once you're there, you can even turn a screw (or pull a jumper on some devices) to unlock the write protection of the firmware flash chip.

https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download... provides tested replacement firmware that make running 'regular' operating systems more comfortable on many Chromebooks (no more security measures in the form of scary warning screens and 'return to factory' key combos). That may kill warranty - or not.

I find that this is a pretty reasonable trade off between providing an 'unbreakable' secure-by-default (hence the auto updates, which also cover firmware) configuration that is also reasonably safe against drive-by attacks (that's why the jumper is inside the device) while allowing people to use their hardware differently if they want. This doesn't rely on security problems that are used as 'jail break' elsewhere.

And yes, the SSD is soldered on. There's not a whole lot of space in that box, and soldering makes things so much more compact.

(Disclosure: I work on Chrome OS firmware)

I don't know about modern chromebooks, but I have an Acer C7 that I spent $199 on and then added another $240 for it to have a 128GB SSD, 16GB RAM, a working bluetooth module, and an upgraded battery. $440 total and it's been a solid dev machine running first chrubuntu and now crouton. I've mentioned before that the only issue I've had with it is lack of CPU horsepower for clojure-based work to get into the REPL, which as I understand, is slightly fixed on later iterations (or other models). All of my hardware (AFAICT) works under Linux, and I use Google Hangouts, Skype, Steam (for TFC), and vim/tmux on it routinely.

I guess my point is that people don't always have wifi. I want to use my laptop on the plane (though some airlines now offer super-exorbitantly-priced wifi, I still refuse to pay for it) or in the back seat of a car.

I should be able to tap away at a document or use a Thunderbird-style "send emails when you next have connectivity" mail client.

My understanding is that the Google apps don't currently offer this.

(wearing my coreboot developer hat): We care about BSD. And Windows. And Solaris, Haiku, and whatever else comes our way that runs after coreboot. The amount of care varies with developers, and Linux is indeed the OS that sees the most interest.

If BSD fails with coreboot + SeaBIOS, that's a bug, and I'd love to hear about it. And I think so would the SeaBIOS developer and the QEmu people who use the same PCBIOS implementation.

These are ARM Chromebooks though so there is no conventional bios to flash.

They have u-boot with support for booting external media turned off so all you need to do is turn that on and make bootable media.

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv7/samsung/samsung-chro...

That's great, thanks for the explanation. Does the battery life stays the same with Arch?

From that link: "you must download a tool known as Crouton, which will allow Ubuntu to run on top of Chrome OS"

No, I don't want to run Ubuntu on top of of Chrome OS; I want to completely wipe out Chrome.

The most expensive Chromebook doesn't cater to Thinkpad users. The Lenovo Chromebook might.

Go to amazon,plenty of products for a reasonable price.

FWIW, https://store.google.com/category/chromebooks lists bunch of chromebooks for sale in the US, including the new Pixel.

> Why would people want to pay JUST for a fucking browser?

Because there's a lot you can do with a browser these days. You can even run offline apps and native code (Emscripten, NaCl, PNaCl).

Also, if you turn on developer mode, you can access all the Gentoo bits that hide underneath the Chrome bits.

Consider common use cases - word processing, social media, organising photos, communication - all can be done with a stock Chromebook. Once developers realise the full potential, you'll see bigger, better games that run on Chrome (check out Bastion and From Dust on the Chrome web store - pretty impressive already).

Why do you think running Windows is an advantage?

Yeah, I think this is more because of Rockchip than because of Google. Rockchip manages to make a potent processor for very little, which is what is powering these. Google's volumes help as well but I would give more props to Rockchip

I've been thinking about that myself - the IPS screen is certainly more appealing.

Still has a dependency on an external mainframe though; better to buy an Intel NUC perhaps?

It doesn't just have to be hardware level hacking. c9 is great but, anywhere that you want a decent amount of control over web server(apache, tomcat) configs, graphics acceleration for games, or storage of large local files, you're going to need something more. I'd take Ubuntu any day. Given the choice, what are some reasons to actually choose Chrome OS over Ubuntu?